One more invasion of your privacy

Updated below:

It's no great surprise, I guess, but today's NY Times describes how the government is sifting through our bank records without a warrant -- along with everything else they're sifting through. Just becasue a government spokesman tells the NY Times that this is completely legal doesn't make it so. The government claims everything it does is legal, after all.

WASHINGTON, June 22 — 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.

What I'm a little surprised by is that this story hasn't gotten any traction in the blogosphere -- at least not yet.

Ho hum, the government's spying on us again. So, what else is new?

Update:

I see that Tristero, over at Hullabaloo, has a tongue in cheek response:

Whew. Well, that's reassuring. There's really no potential for abuse. None. Just read the article.

I'm sure they have to obtain the proper warrants. And the outside firm that verifies there really is a good reason to examine the data has zero ties to the Republican party.

Look, it's not as if there's a systematic attempt on the part of the Bush administration to break down longstanding legal or institutional barriers to the government's access to private information about Americans and others inside the United States. It's only a temporary thing anyway, a response to a national emergency.

They're not just turning on a vacuum cleaner and sucking in all the information that they can.