Well, you probably know about this by now:

Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror

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....

--New York Times

The administration is furious about the fact that this has come to light, right? Well, yes, that's what we're told:

Administration officials ... asked The New York Times not to publish this article, saying that disclosure of the ... program could jeopardize its effectiveness....

On Thursday evening, Dana Perino, deputy White House press secretary, said: ... "The president is concerned that once again The New York Times has chosen to expose a classified program that is working to protect our citizens."

Am I crazy to suspect that that's not exactly true? Am I crazy to suspect that the administration might want this and other privacy stories out there now?

Consider the reaction in the right blogosphere, which is as expected:

I'll resist the temptation to say Ann Coulter was right about where Timothy McVeigh should have gone with his truck bomb. I'll say only this: it's becoming increasingly clear to me that the people at the New York Times are not just biased media folks whose antics can be laughed off. They are actually dangerous.

It's hard to imagine that this program could still be effective. If it worked at first, as the article suggests it did, surely terrorists would have changed their methods of shifting money around to escape detection. So it's reasonable to think that the program isn't very useful anymore.

Except as a spur to right-wing rage.

I think the administration is feeding stories like this to the press right now as part of the '06 campaign. The GOP base doesn't differentiate between the media and the Democratic Party -- they're all treasonous lefties. But you still have to fire the base up, give them a reason to vote Republican.

Feeding a story like this to the Times and then denouncing it as an attack on national security in a time of war would certainly accomplish that.