WASHINGTON -- When Sen Ron Wyden stepped to the Senate floor last December, he had something on his mind. He was disturbed by what he’d learned about the way the executive branch had used a section of the USA Patriot Act to collect records from millions of Americans’ phones.

But he didn’t feel free to tell the American people what he knew.

"Senate rules regarding classified information prevent me from discussing the details of that ruling or how many Americans were affected, over what period of time," Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said in a carefully worded floor statement. Congress prides itself on being the most open of the three branches of government, where business is conducted publicly and constituents are welcome to watch. But the phone records controversy shows that even among the elected representatives of the people, secrecy can overcome open discussions of public policy.

Former Rep. Mickey Edwards, an Oklahoma Republican, says “the idea that the executive branch is able to tell the Congress of the United States that you can’t say this or that” is alien to the concept of Congress as an equal branch of government.

“Congress has forgotten its role. They have the ability to decide what’s classified: They make the laws, they write the laws,” said Edwards, who’s the director of the Aspen Institute-Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership.

Jane Harman, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson Center and a former Democratic member of the House of Representatives from California, said dealing with classification issues had grown extremely complicated for Congress, where she served on the House Intelligence, Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.

“It is the executive branch’s prerogative to classify,” she said. But, she noted, the rules governing classification often mean that entire documents that could be made public are withheld because of a single sensitive paragraph.

“It’s too complicated,” she said. “Instead of classifying a whole document because of one paragraph, redact the paragraph.”

The law at the center of the current controversy, Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, has long been the subject of open debate. But the results of its application have been little discussed because those investigations remain classified.

The section allows the government to seek an order for “production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

In practice, it led to a request for the daily delivery to the National Security Agency of records kept by the Verizon phone company of millions of cellphone accounts. Those records provided information such as which numbers had been called and how long phone calls had lasted.

The extent of how the law’s provision had been used was what Wyden felt he couldn’t discuss.

An intelligence reauthorization measure that set parameters for the agencies in fiscal 2013 and passed both houses of Congress last December was approved only after Wyden, who’s long spoken out about government potential for overreaching, had sections removed that he thought would put curbs on background briefings for reporters and public comments by former government officials.