The Times does it again

Michelle Malkin has a good summary with lots of links up about the NY Times blowing the cover of yet another successful anti-terrorist tool. Here is the Times' description (I'm not going to link to it, Michelle has a link up on her blog):

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government
and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.

She has addresses where you can write to the papers that ran with the story and express your displeasure. I think that the time for that is long past. If the publishers of papers like the New York Times cared about what their readers thought they would have made changes a long time ago in order to stop their disastrous decline in readership.

What we need to do is write to congress and the Justice Department. If media outlets in the US are going to break the law by revealing classified information they need to be prosecuted just like anyone else would be.

There is a very good change that innocent people will die because of what the NYT did. They should not be held blameless for it.