News-Record.com

It's tempting to write off the controversy over The New York Times' reporting on surveillance of financial transactions as utterly meaningless. So tempting. And yet ...

I do not mean to say the Times did anything illegal, even though that's what the president and vice president have been saying. Quite the contrary: Although classified, the program had been no secret at all, and if you doubt me, then take the word of one of the president's own counterterrorism experts:

"There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. "The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."

(UPDATE: Additional background here from former banker TBogg and his banking commenters on just how widely known (outside the U.S.) SWIFT and its capabilities are.)

That being the case, it's a little unclear why the program was classified in the first place, although that classification is consistent with the administration's policy of decreasing public access to the workings and records of government -- a policy that predates 9/11.

It also raises a question: Do the president and vice president not know the Times (and the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal) did nothing wrong? I don't know. And if they do know it, then why are they saying what they're saying? I don't know that, either. (UPDATE: Media critic Dan Kennedy hazards a hypothesis:

The White House and its defenders also give the game away by refusing to differentiate between the NSA no-warrant wiretapping program -- obviously illegal, given that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires warrants -- and the SWIFT program, which appears to be on more solid legal ground.

By lumping them together, folks like U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., make it clear that they're only interested in scoring points against the media.

(Why score points against the media? To energize their voting base for the fall elections, if in fact "scoring points against the media" is what they're trying to do and they aren't honestly mistaken.)

What I do know is that the incident has sparked a wave of pro-administration protest that the Times, the reporters and senior editors should be prosecuted for espionage, if not treason. Some commenters are even calling for vigilantism, as in this post at the Powerline blog, the one that took credit for taking down Dan Rather:

It is unfortunately past time for the Bush administration to enforce the laws of the United States against the New York Times. The Times and its likeminded media colleagues will undoubtedly continue to undermine and betray the national security of the United States until they are taught that they are subject to the same laws that govern the conduct of ordinary citizens, or until an enraged citizenry decides, like Bill Keller, to take the law into its own hands and express its disagreement some other way.

Nice First Amendment you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

Well, I would remind the Powerline boys, secure in their Minnesota law offices, of a couple of things.

First, they've been wrong on pretty much every legal issue involving the administration to come down the pike. (UPDATE: There's even a law about this, to go along with those of Murphy and Godwin, called Ezra's Law, coined by Ezra Klein: "Powerline ... has no bleeping idea what they're talking about at any given moment.") They don't deal in law on their blog; they deal in stroking some very paranoid fantasies.

Second, this is North Carolina. Down here, even the journalists carry guns.

Y'all have a nice day.