Obama defends NSA spying on Americans as "transparent," respecting "privacy"

Possibly the NSA spying on Americans can be rationalized by the need to provide security.  But that claim is quite different than saying that the operation was "transparent" and that it respected Americans' "privacy."  Could someone please explain to me how the spying on Americans was "transparent" if it wasn't even public knowledge that it was occurring?  If it was "transparent," what new information could Snowden have possibly revealed?  I am not even sure how it was "transparent" to the secret court that oversaw this operation since there was no alternative viewpoint provided to the court, no adversarial debate where information could be produced that called into question Obama administration claims.  An adversarial approach would be more likely to reveal to the judges information that the Obama administration might not have offered to them on its own.  From Fox News:

. . . Obama also defended the National Security Agency spying programs and called them "transparent."
“That’s why we set up the FISA court,” he said, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism. . . .

As to the claim that this respected people's privacy, could someone please explain how keeping track of who you talk to, how long you talk to them, and where you are when you make the calls respects people's privacy?

Obama, who repeated earlier assertions that the programs were a legitimate counterterror tool and that they were completely noninvasive to people with no terror ties, said he has created a privacy and civil liberties oversight board. . . .