Today's NYT reports that the Justice Department will claim the "state secrets" privilege requires the dismissal of a private lawsuit against the "Swift" banking consortium for providing the U.S. government with access to financial transaction records.

The Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn again to a legal tool, the "state secrets" privilege, to try to stop a suit against a Belgian banking cooperative that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the United States government, court documents show.

The suit against the consortium, known as Swift, threatens to disrupt the operations of a vital national security program and to disclose "highly classified information" if it continues, the Justice Department has said in court filings.

A hearing on the suit is scheduled for Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Va. . . .

If the administration makes good on its intention to invoke the privilege in the Swift suit, it would be one of the most significant tests of the privilege.

Swift is considered the nerve center of the global banking industry, routing trillions of dollars each day among banks, brokerage houses and other financial institutions. Its partnership with Washington, reported in The New York Times in June 2006, gave Central Intelligence Agency and Treasury Department officials access to millions of records on international banking transactions.

The access was part of an effort to trace money that investigators believed might be linked to financing of terrorism.