Over on The Home Front, Mark Yost notes that during the Clin-ton administration the media didn't seem quite so concerned that the government was tracking international financial transactions:
A decade ago, when I was an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, I took an interest in money laundering and what the G-7 (now G-8) were doing to try and stem it. Meetings were often held in Brussels, where I was based, and on several trips back to the U.S. I visited the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a then little-known adjunct of the Treasury Department that was developing some pretty sophisticated software to not only track international financial transactions, but to disentangle them so that they could see who was really transferring the money. The targets then, of course, were tax cheats and drug dealers and there was nary a peep out of the press about civil rights and the Fourth Amendment. Of course, now that we're fighting an enemy that can really do harm to us, and the avenger is George Bush, the whole thing is an outrage.
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