Thanks, Bill!

Gee, thanks, New York Times.

A human rights group in London said Tuesday that it had lodged complaints in 32 countries against a banking consortium in Brussels, contending that it violated European and Asian data protection rules by providing the United States with confidential information about international money transfers.

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said the organization filed the complaints with the data protection authorities with the aim of halting what it called “illegal transfers” of private information to the United States by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or Swift.

The complaints were filed in the 25 EU countries, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Lichtenstein, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland and the Chinese territory of Hong Kong.

…

On Tuesday, the European Parliament’s center-right European People’s Party, its largest and most influential grouping, called for the EU to open an inquiry into the legality of Swift’s actions. Thomas Bickl, a spokesman for the party, said it was concerned that the transfers had been made as part of a covert and untransparent operation.

Today, millions more dollars are moving to terrorists from the people who fund them and we have no way to track that cash at all. Tomorrow, that money will pay for murder.

Instead of using a perfectly legal and highly effective program to prevent those murders before they happen or to catch the terrorists before they can hit another nightclub in Bali, we will find ourselves defending that program from people who more highly prize the terrorists’ right to blow us up than our right not to be blown up.

We have Bill Keller and his newspaper to thank for it. Everyone thank Bill.

(h/t: The Corner)