Americans are learning what electronics whizzes and hackers have known all along — that computers and smartphones, which make our lives more productive and entertaining, have at the same time ended privacy as most of us have understood it.
Every e-mail, cellphone call, transferred photo, video and voice mail, online purchase and Internet game leaves a digital trail that identifies not just sender, receiver, length of message and location but also a variety of other data that perhaps we hoped to keep secret.
Against that background, how does the U.S. intelligence community convince American citizens that it is not misusing the metadata it has access to as part of the nation's effort to keep track of potential terrorists and prevent attacks?