What, that old thing?

The controversy over the media coverage of the leak about the SWIFT program is out of control. Congress and the prez are hyperventilating, the press is becoming (more) indignant about their freedom and the pundits have escalated their screaming match a few decibels.

Here's the lowdown:
Someone in the gov't leaked a story about a monitoring program the feds are using to track the movement of potential financial support for terrorist organizations. Sounds like a good idea, don't it? Several news outlets, the NYT among them, ran articles on this program on the angle that it is potentially another program that without oversight could spiral into severe privacy rights violations. The republicans are now charging the paper with treason on the grounds that this information helps the terrorists. One congressman went so far as to say that it directly put our troops in danger. (the WSJ ran a similar article, also on their front page the same day, but the repub's are specifically calling for charges against the Times. Hmmm)

Here's the problem with this phony furor; the program was not a secret. Details were publicly available years ago. Even if Mr. Terror didn't have the exact details, he probably heard Bush mention just such a program in a speech back in 2002 and moved to better cover his tracks. Shit, I knew about this in a general manner and I'm an idiot. If the asshole terrorists didn't know about it already, then they aren't paying attention. If they aren't paying attention, they wouldn't have read the article and found out about it. It would have taken something like a major flipout on the part of the president and his party's elected officials yelling and screaming about it to make them notice...oh wait...