At Least We Know What Your Priorities Are

What do you worry about more?

a. Invasion of privacy if counter-terrorism agents track global financial transactions

b. Turning the Sears Tower into a 110-story fireball

If you're the Washington Post, the answer is (a). The top story on page one is Bank Records Secretly Tapped wherein Posties Barton Gellman, Paul Blustein and Dafna Linzer report on a scoop by the New York Times' Eric Lichtblau and James Risen. And by scoop I mean "increasing my chances of being murdered by terrorists."

The boring news 7 Held in Miami Terror Plot Targeting Sears Tower is on A26, though granted it's easy to find there on top of Hecht's Ready Set SHOP! ad. SAVE ON EVERYTHING YOU NEED FOR SUMMER!

Love this line in the Post's bank records story:

Together with a hundredfold expansion of the FBI's use of "national security letters" to obtain communications and banking records, the secret NSA and Treasury programs have built unprecedented government databases of private transactions, most of them involving people who prove irrelevant to terrorism investigators.

You mean investigators don't know certain indivduals are terrorists until after they check to see whether they're, you know, terrorists? What kind of Keystone Kops operation is this anyway?

UPDATE: Courtesy of Wizbang and Fox News, I see The New York Times played the same game on story placement.

Comments

[Right Valley]

From The Right Valley:
http://www.cliffordcroft.com/rightvalley/index.asp

The New York Times has delighted in revealing confidential information about the methods our security services are using in the war on terror. These disclosures naturally compromise our efforts to fight terrorists by making the terrorists alert as to how we track them, making the terrorist plots harder to discover and increasing the risk that terrorist attacks against the US will be undiscovered. In other words, their disclosures potentially put lives in danger.

But the Times seems to feel that the public's "right to know" outweighs all this. If the public's "right to know" is so strong, I think the public also has a "right to know" more about the New York Times. I think the government should do the following:

o) Tap the phones of all columnists of the New York Times and then print the names of all their sources in their articles (if these sources actually exist). The public has a "right to know" who these anonymous sources are, to better judge the credibility of their statements. This might inhibit people from giving off-the-record information to the times, but hey, the public has a right to know.

o) Print the income, net worth, and credit card and bank account numbers and balances of all editors and reporters for the New York Times. Sure, people could misuse this information, but the public's right to this information is more important.

o) Publish the net worth and distributions from the Sulzberger trust fund. Again, this is private financial information, but the public has a right to know who is funding the Times and where the money is going. And besides, once this disclosure is made, we can find out how much the Sulzberger's are giving to "the poor" every year!

o) Publish the political affiliations and political donations of all reporters and editors of the times, as well as political organizations they belong to. A small invasion of privacy, but that still doesn't trump our "right to know". If this information is displayed in a pictorial format, we can play "Where's Waldo" to find the single Republican!