Saturday, July 01, 2006

NY Times and SWIFT

Ed Brayton calls out both the NY Times and those accusing the Times of treason for reporting that the U.S. government is data mining in financial data from SWIFT. He points out that the Times is criticizing the U.S. government for doing what the Times itself editorialized in favor of the government doing, and also points out that it hasn't really revealed anything of significance that the Bush administration hadn't already publicly said it was doing. Further, the only actually new thing reported--that the government is accessing large amounts of data with broad subpoenas, rather than specific transactions--was also reported by the Wall Street Journal, but without it being hit with the same criticisms as the Times.

This is a significant outbreak of inconsistency.

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