NYT Public Editor Byron Calame announced yesterday that he was wrong to initially support the Times’s decision to expose the SWIFT bank data program:

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Oh well. No harm, no foul, right?

Secret U.S. access to bank data slammed by BelgiumAssociated Press BRUSSELS, BELGIUM — The money transfer company SWIFT has for years secretly supplied U.S. authorities with massive amounts of personal data for use in anti-terror investigations, violating EU privacy rules, a Belgian commission said Thursday.
“SWIFT finds itself in a conflicting position between American and European law,” Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said.
Mr. Verhofstadt spoke after Belgium’s privacy protection commission presented its findings on the case, although it did not call for immediate legal action. The premier said that his government also would not take legal action to shut down the data transfers.
The report said that while SWIFT did all it could to live up to Belgian, EU and U.S. regulations to hand over the requested information, it finds itself in a legal quagmire that must be urgently corrected.
“It has to be seen as a gross miscalculation by SWIFT that it has, for years, secretly and systematically transferred massive amounts of personal data for surveillance without effective and clear legal basis and independent controls in line with Belgian and European law,” the commission concluded.

I suppose we should be thankful that Belgium won’t be shutting down the program. But any details that the Times left unexposed will eventually come out as the EU continues to investigate.