While I agree that citizens' privacy needs to be protected, obviously there is a much greater focus on terrorism since the September 11 attacks, and the US has engaged in conflicts in two countries. It seems only natural that more activities of a secret nature would be taking place, now that we have clearly been made aware that there are people out there that actually would launch an attack on the United States, instead of substance-free posturing.

However, since we cannot really know what the secret requests were for, we cannot simply acquiesce to the potential eroding of our civil liberties. I just think that secrecy (at least not necessarily) == (evil|bigbrother|invasionofprivacy), which is the inevitable conclusion some here will reach.