Bank Data Secretly Reviewed by U.S. to Fight Terror

NYTimes ^ | June 22, 2006 | ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

[baseball_fan]

I cannot remember who exactly said it today, maybe Treasury Secretary Snow?, but they compared it to what would have happened if the secret about Enigma in WWII had become publicly known. At first I thought this an overstatement; I'm not sure now.

The one thing that has tempered my outrage on this is the thought of what standards of privacy would I want if a demagogue like Huey Long in the '30s were to be elected president. We would want safeguards that would seem unreasonable for the current administration.

Yet even these concerns I'm assuming could have been handled through our elected representatives or at worst through the courts rather than the press. If and only if all those avenues were blocked and abuses were occuring would a calculation about going public have to be made.

If I were a suspense novelist, I can only imagine the kinds of stories the huge number of wire transfers that take place every day might tell. Funds going from Venezuela to Cuba? Iran to China? I expect we might get some real pushback now from some other countries over the control of this intelligence asset and that might start to represent an Enigma-like loss.