Demanding that newspapers only post official government views, like they do in North Korea, Syria, and China is a favorite goal of many White house fans these days. Unfortunately it goes against all those pesky ideals of a democracy. Why do these Bush fans believe that the public is unable to think for themselves and information therefore has to be filtered?

I assume you a referring to the SWIFT system which deals with money transfer. It has never been a secret. If you have taken a course or two in macroeconomics you must have heard of it. But for the ignorant crowd who only follows the news when they show a picture of Britney’s butt it is probably a great revelation. The way the information was sipped by the Treasury Department was not public knowledge because they did it illegally. The Department was in other words committing a crime and that was stopped. The difference between a democracy and a police state is that in the former the law must be obeyed even when it is inconvenient. Nothing stops the Treasury Department from trying to make a legal arrangement with SWIFT.