It was reported in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times on Friday of the existence of a secret government program run by the Treasury Department that accesses a vast database of international bank transfers involving thousands of Americans in the United States.

The Bush administration provided the same response to the existence of the secret program to monitor international bank transfers as the secret warrantless wiretapping program.

They tell the American public not to worry because they have safeguards in place and besides, the program is vital in the war against terrorism. The American people are supposed to trust that the so-called safeguards are sufficient enough to prevent abuse.

Dr. Steven Taylor from Poliblog has a major concern when the federal government states that the latest secret government surveillance program is limited in nature:

"One would hope. However, I must confess: such protestations always strike me as odd: if we know exactly who and what we are looking for, why do we need all the other data? I know that they are looking for patterns and patterns and therefore need other information, yet they always make it sound like they know where the needle is and just happened to have taken the whole haystack with them just in case. Rather is seems to me that to find the needle that they are examining quite a bit of the haystack and not just the al Qaeda tainted portions."

Bush apologist Michelle Malkin is hopping mad on her blog when she learned that newspapers like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times would dare to inform the public on what the federal government is doing.