But treason is very likely what would be claimed. Suppose the U.S. army were running a secret, covert war against Native Americans. Someone gets wind of opera

But treason is very likely what would be claimed. Suppose the U.S. army were running a secret, covert war against Native Americans. Someone gets wind of operational details and publishes them in a newspaper. What then? Do we side with the government because operational details are legitimately protected by a doctrine of military secrets or classified information, or do we side with the newspaper because the war against Native Americans was a human rights travesty? Or suppose the colonies had spies or a method of procuring information about Redcoat army operations, and some redcoat sympathizer published that. In those times, the publisher might have had his house torched and been driven out of town. Of course information about the NSA's surveillance is at least one step removed from actual operational information that would be classified historically. You didn't classify knowledge of tradecraft, although such knowledge always has and will mark one as an unusual sort of person; what was classified was the information obtained through tradecraft. The Intelligence Community's argument is that it's so difficult to get the information we need through actual targeted tradecraft that we have to rely on mass surveillance, and that works best if the details of how that mass surveillance works are kept classified. Isolation from public oversight leads to intelligence capabilities that keep escalating until privacy of the country's own citizens or allies is in jeopardy. And the rather simplistic notions from the founding era of secrecy, for military operations or diplomatic negotiations, pitted against freedom of the press, don't shine a lot of light on this ideological divide.