[There was a video here]

This week, we learned that the NSA is engaged in a series of prodigious data-mining operations in concert with several huge communications and technology companies. Today, Obama addressed the news. He didn't make anyone feel better.

"I think it's important to understand that you can't have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president told reporters. And anyway, "nobody is listening to your phone calls." The collection of telephone call metadata by the NSA is just a "modest encroachment."

Never mind that there's still an enormous amount of information that can be gleaned from "metadata"—why are we supposed to take the president seriously on this issue? "I welcome this debate" on privacy and security, Obama says, but the debate Obama is intent on welcoming can't happen unless the government—all three branches—comes clean about the existence (and extent) of its surveillance program. "When you actually look at the details, I think we've struck the right balance," Obama insists. But we can't look at the details.

And we likely won't, especially when Obama, as he put it, doesn't "welcome leaks," and aggressively prosecutes leakers. Maybe this "debate" would be—as Obama says—"healthy for democracy" if we were having it, but we're not. And until we have the means to do so, our democracy doesn't look very healthy at all.