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I have little use for the Times, but I fail to see what the big deal is here. Since shortly after 9/11, President Bush (and various other members of his administration) have been loudly proclaiming that the government is tracking the finances of suspected terrorists (as we should be doing, of course). They've proclaimed that we're using every available option to do so (again, as we should be doing). For example, a White House press release from 9/10/04 stated that:

"The targeting of terrorist financing continues to play an important role in the war on terror. Freezing assets, terminating cash flows, and following money trails to previously unknown terrorist cells are some of the many weapons used against terrorist networks. The United States has designated 387 individuals and entities as terrorists or terrorist financiers. The global community has frozen more than $142 million in terrorist-related assets. These steps make it harder for terrorists to build networks, recruit and train new members, and carry out attacks."

So the fact that we're monitoring international financial networks is nothing new (even before 9/11, such monitoring occurred in an effort to curb money laundering/drug trafficking/etc.). All this report by the Times did was affirm 2 things:

1)That, among the actions taken, we're monitoring the SWIFT database/network. This is (or should be) nothing new. The SWIFT database itself has a website (it's not any sort of secret database), and on that website it states that:

"SWIFT has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organisations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF*), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities."

and

2)That this program is based on broad administrative subpoenas, rather than the case-by-case judicial subpoenas that most previous financial tracking has used. Though the merits of such administrative subpoenas can be debated, such a revelation can hardly be considered treasonous.

The Times has done some disgraceful things in the course of the WoT, of course. But I don't think this is necessarily one of them - it seems more likely that the administration's harsh criticism of the Times in this case is an effort to score some political points by playing on the (legitimate) hostility/mistrust many feel towards the Times.

to piggyback off my own comment, we have the government saying, "We're using every available means to track terrorist financing," and we have the SWIFT people saying, "We work with governments to track the use of financial systems for illegal activities," but people on here are arguing that the Times is somehow treasonous for reporting that "the government is using the SWIFT database (an available resource) to track terrorist financing (an illegal activity)."