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There is a difference between saying "phone lines can be tapped" and "hey, Claude Jones, the drug dealer on 43rd and 16th, the Feds have been tapping your phone lines since last Tuesday."
Odds are this is somewhere in between and I don't know enough to know exactly where. But that seems somewhat irrelevant. Pretty much everybody seems to agree that it was a legal program and the hook on which Bill Keller hung running the story was that it was "open" to abuse. Not that abuse was happening (as is a case more easily made with the wiretapping story) but just that it could happen.
If a legal program is legally classified, I don't like the idea of the editorial team at a newspaper deciding what gets to remain classified. However, I also support most of the protections that allow the New York Times to run such stories (even if I think them misguided) so I probably have to live with the tradeoff.
That said, the government is thoroughly justified in tracking and punishing whoever is leaking the information to the New York Times.
ETA: Being somewhat familiar with banking regulation I can also say that pretty much any large transation (whether domestic or international) is either monitored by the government or regulations require banks to keep certain information should the government ever decide they want it. Smart terrorists will know this as it is not a secret and will work to avoid it already. But then odds are good that relatively few of the terrorists are smart.
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