I've stayed away from talking about the New York Times exposing the NSA's program in tracking / wire-tapping of overseas phone calls in the War on Terror, mainly because I wasn't able to keep up with all the points of what the Times called 'illegal'.

Is it illegal or is it just barely weaving itself through the legal loopholes? I don't know - it'll be determined in the courts soon enough.

But Patterico points big neon arrows to what I feared about the exposure of the program:

Yesterday's Court Decision Proves the NSA Disclosures Harmed National Security

Let me put that into plain English: terrorists and their associates will no longer communicate with these plaintiffs via e-mail and telephone — in other words, ways that the government could monitor under the surveillance program — because the terrorists are aware of the surveillance program. It’s not the Terrorist Surveillance Program itself that has caused terrorists to cease these international communications. It’s the fact that the terrorists now know about it.

Greenwald and other lefties say that terrorists had always assumed their communications were being monitored, but these plaintiffs say otherwise. They say that, for a period of time, they communicated freely with these terrorists — but then along came revelations of the TSP, and their telephone and Internet communications with these suspected terrorists ceased.

Now: if terrorists will no longer communicate with lawyers, scholars, and journalists...do you think they may also have ceased their telephone and Internet communications with fellow terrorists?

Of course they have. Which means that the government is no longer monitoring those telephone or e-mail communications. The terrorists have had to find other ways to communicate — ways that the government may not be able to monitor as easily, or at all.

The terrorists have adapted. And we can thank our friends at the New York Times.

Unless the plaintiffs were all lying, this is solid evidence that the NSA disclosures by the New York Times have indeed harmed our national security.

IMHO, this is right up there with complete bullsh*t....it's like if the NYT had exposed the U.S. Navy's 'MAGIC' program in late November 1941 about the cracking of the Japanese codes.

And rest assured that should another 9/11 attack happen in the United States that these bone heads will be the first to be foaming-at-the-mouth about why hadn't the government done something to stop the attack.

The New York Times....the 'newspaper of record' for the land of Hypocrisy.

(By way of Michelle Malkin)