What I am really annoyed about is that it was not confidential because it would tell the enemy what the government is doing.  The information was classified so that the America people would not be informed of the program and thus could not sue on constitutional grounds.  The courts have said secret programs cannot be found to be unconstitutional because they are secret and no one knows if they are actually occurring and no one knows who they are occurring on.

The point of it being confidential is so the public does not know and does not stop the program from occurring.

One interesting thing that I heard on the radio discussing privacy is that as the world becomes more connected and information is digitized privacy of the public becomes less but secrecy also becomes less of these programs.  In he past information was in hard copy and thus hard to disclose.  Now that many people have more access to information because it is digitized and keeping networks has become more specialized the secrecy of these programs is less easy to conceal.