"The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites..."

"... as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document."

The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority....

The document justifies the targeting based on their expressions indicating that "Non-Muslims are a threat to Islam" or "offensive jihad is justified," or "the U.S. brought the 9/11 attacks on itself."

Do you object to the NSA preparing to discredit people like that by collecting information on their use of pornography? The linked article, at the Huffington Post, reminds us of the old FBI history of keeping files on, among others, Martin Luther King, Jr.

The FBI today displays its file on MLK, here. If you go there, you can click into lots of files through the links in the sidebar. Writing this post, I got distracted into reading about whether Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx were Communists. Somehow these 2 were nevertheless on TV all the time in the 1950s.

And did you know the FBI wasted time trying to figure out what was up with ESP? From the file on William Foos: "Should his claims be well-founded, there is no limit to the value which could accrue to the FBI  — complete and undetectable access to mail, the diplomatic pouch; visual access to buildings — the possibilities are unlimited insofar as law enforcement and counterintelligence are concerned."

Ridiculous... but in the end, they only had to wait for email, and then they had it — complete and undetectable access to mail... the possibilities are unlimited insofar as law enforcement and counterintelligence are concerned.

"To me the Beirut bombing started it all. The person they said was responsible was (Osama) Bin Laden's mentor, from what I've been told."

Said Kim Carlson, the sister of Jesse J. Ellison of Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, who died at the age of 19 in the bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The 30th anniversary of the bombing was Wednesday.

"I kind of held a lot of resentment against President (Ronald) Reagan at the time because he didn't take any action. It makes you wonder had they taken action would that have made (terrorists) think twice before coming after us with all the other bombings. But maybe it would have made it worse."...

Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon in 1982 on a peacekeeping mission during the Lebanese Civil War. Six months before the barracks bombing, the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was hit by a suicide bomber, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans. The Islamic Jihadist Organization claimed credit for the bombings as well as kidnappings and other terrorist activities and demanded that Americans leave Lebanon.....

The Marine barracks bombing helped solidify what would later become informally known as the Powell-Weinberger doctrine: American troops would not go anywhere unless there was a clearly defined objective, a willingness to send a massive force and the American people were solidly behind the action, [said UW-Madison history professor John Hall].

"Facebook is allowing videos showing people being decapitated to be posted and shared on its site once again."

"The social network had placed a temporary ban on the material in May following complaints that the clips could cause long-term psychological damage."

The US firm now believes its users should be free to watch and condemn, but not celebrate, such videos.

How are they controlling how people react to what they see?

Facebook's terms and conditions now state that it will remove photos or videos that "glorify violence" in addition to other banned material, including a woman's "fully exposed breast."

Idiocy.

The unintended "absurdity" theme.

After posting that last post, I saw I'd done 2 posts in a row with "absurdity" in the title. That more or less determines that I will at least do a Google "news" search on the word in an effort to make some sense of the coincidence. Perhaps everything is coming together today over absurdity.

I see there are over 3000 current news articles on congressional absurdity, and I decline to click on things like "The Double Absurdity of Ted Cruz's 'Filibuster.'" I also don't care about "The love for fantastic absurdity at the [Boston Symphony Orchestra]" or "The Sheer Absurdity of Favoring Eli Manning Over Peyton Manning."

But I'm motivated to click on "The absurdity of education" in the Saudi Gazette (comparing a British girls' school with 2 teachers and 8 students to a Saudi girls' school with 600 students and 50 teachers and no working bathrooms).

And then there's "2013 Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate absurdity and science," including:

Safety/Engineering Prize: The late Gustano Pizzo, for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers. The system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane’s specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to Earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival. US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, anti-hijacking system for aircraft, May 1972.

And:

Peace Prize: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding. The audience was asked not to applaud and were given a demonstration of one-handed clapping.

"Please forgive me, we are not monsters," said the terrorist to the 4-year-old boy who had called him "a very bad man."

This Daily Mail item forefronts the daring, outspoken little boy, Elliot Prior. Your heart is supposed to tingle at the boy's courage as he "protected his mother, Amber, who had been shot in the leg" in the Kenyan mall massacre and was the reason the terrorist "took pity." But scroll down and see:

The terrorists said if any of the kids were alive in the supermarket they could leave. 'Amber made the decision to stand up and say "yes".'... After discovering [that Amber Prior] was of French origin, the men began to plead with her and claimed that the Muslim faith ‘was not a bad one.’

‘He told me I had to change my religion to Islam and said “do you forgive us? Do you forgive us?’, the mother told The Independent. ‘Naturally, I was going to say whatever they wanted and they let us go.’

It's nice to think about the boy, but it was the mother, who figured out how to tell the right lies convincingly. She gains pride through the boy, who, at 4, had no way to use strategy and guile, like his mother, who continues to use strategy and guile as she talks to the press and diverts attention away from whatever shame and humiliation she may feel over the lies she chose to tell to save herself and her children.

Presumably, if she had stood tall, proclaimed herself a Christian, and brought death to herself and her children, her courage would have been celebrated at the top of the article. I'm saying this to celebrate Amber Prior.

"I thought it might be better to be like a chameleon — able to adapt and change and blend with our environment rather than conquer it."

Said Ross Langdon, a Tasmanian-born architect who built "eco-lodges and socially sustainable tourism in ecologically sensitive locations." He died in the Nairobi terror attack, along with his partner Elif Yavuz, a Harvard PhD and malaria specialist, who worked for the Clinton foundation.

"Elif was brilliant at her job and a joy to work with.... She was a friend both in and out of the office, and always had a great sense of humor – recently, her baby belly had been the subject of a number of jokes."

ADDED: Many pictures of this couple here.

"The white walls of the All Saints Church were pocked with holes caused by ball bearings or other metal objects contained in the bombs to cause maximum damage."

2 suicide bombers kill more than 60 Christians in Pakistan.

This is the deadliest attack against Christians in our country,” said Irfan Jamil,  bishop of the eastern city of Lahore.

The bishop in Peshawar, Sarfarz Hemphray...  blamed the government and security agencies for failing to protect the country's Christians.  “If the government shows will, it can control this terrorism... We have been asking authorities to enhance security, but they haven't paid any heed."

"Some witnesses said the gunmen had told Muslims to leave and said non-Muslims would be targeted."

BBC reports on the massacre in the upscale shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya:

"They came and said: 'If you are Muslim, stand up. We've come to rescue you," said Elijah Lamau.

He said the Muslims left with their hands up, and then the gunmen shot two people.

The correspondent in Nairobi for the Economist, Daniel Howden told the BBC he spoke to one man with a Christian first name but a Muslim-sounding surname who managed to escape the attackers by putting his thumb over his first name on his ID.

For the annals of religion and violence: Did Buddhism inspire Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter?

WaPo has an article with the headline "Buddist community ponders apparent link between their faith and Navy Yard shooter." (Ponder that egregious spelling error.)

“As Buddhism has spread in the West, it has put forth and maintained an image of being a peaceful religion,” Buddhist ethicist Justin Whitaker, author of the American Buddhist Perspective blog, wrote Tuesday. “This is a myth.”

Buddhism can seem particularly appealing to “mentally unbalanced people seeking to right the ship of their lives, to self-medicate, to curb their impulses, or to give them a firmer grip on reality,” Clark Strand, a contributing editor to the Buddhist publication Tricycle magazine and a former Zen monk, said in an interview....

Are there particular issues for people who delve deeply into meditation but may not have a strong or well-developed connection to Buddhism’s history and theology?

“Meditation alone may have no effect whatsoever on one’s morals and hence overall life,” Whitaker wrote in the blog post. “And it might also, as many people find out early in the process, actually open up deeper layers of pain, anger, and guilt that have been effectively repressed.”

What Whitaker and Strand are not saying is that meditation could exacerbate the problems of someone with mental illness. We're talking about sitting silently within one's own mind, cutting off interaction with others and connections to the concrete world. If that meditating mind is irrational and disordered, why would the result be "a firmer grip on reality"?

"Canadians ask what 'inspired by Al Qaeda ideology' means."

As Mounties say they've uncovered a pressure-cooker bomb plot by John Stewart Nuttall and Amanda Marie Korody of Surrey, B.C., who were "self-radicalized" but "inspired by al-Qaeda ideology."

Nuttall and Korody are said to be "recovering drug addicts and recent converts to Islam." Obviously, other Muslims in Canada aren't pleased to look connected to them. Musa Ismail, president of the B.C. Muslim Association, says:

"We don't know these people, we've never seen these people.... We are proud citizens, we are proud Canadians. These two individuals have nothing to do with Islam, as far as we know."

And while the entire B.C. Muslim community is "absolutely delighted" that Mounties intervened to stop a "potentially huge disaster," Ismail said the RCMP's description of the Canadian-born duo as inspired by Al-Qaeda is an "ill-worded reference" that will focus undue attention on Muslims.

"These are just individuals who copied whatever happened in Boston," he said.

Update on "Egypt appoints member of terror group that once massacred tourists to run tourism region."

We were talking about that headline 2 days ago.

Now: "The new governor of Egypt's Luxor province has resigned amid controversy over his links to an Islamist group that carried out a deadly attack on tourists there in 1997."

Adel Khayat's appointment infuriated many Egyptians and prompted the tourism minister to submit his resignation.

Islamist President Mohammed Morsi had defended Mr Khayat's appointment....

Mr Khayat, a member of the Construction and Development party, had denied any role in Gamaa Islamiya's militant past and pledged to protect tourists. He told a news conference on Sunday: "We will not accept that one drop of blood be spilt because of a position that I did not personally aspire to at any time."

"Egypt appoints member of terror group that once massacred tourists to run tourism region."

WaPo article which I found because it was #6 on a Buzzfeed list of "100% Picture-Perfect Ironic Photos."

AND: As long as we're over here on Buzzfeed: "23 Pictures That Prove Society Is Doomed." (But it's not the terrorism.)

UPDATE: "Islamist governor of Egypt's Luxor quits after uproar."

"57% Fear Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents."

According to a new Rasmussen Poll. Only 30% say that's unlikely (while 14% are unsure).

Republicans and unaffiliated voters strongly voice this fear. Democrats are more evenly divided with a modest plurality considering such abuse unlikely.

Does it feel "unlikely" when what you really believe is that if it's going to happen, what's likely is that it will help your side, in which case, why worry? Does it feel "likely" when what you really think is that if it does happen, it's your side that will get burned?

The poll also showed that "33% approve of the NSA program to fight terrorism, while 50% are opposed."

A plurality of Democrats support the plan, consistent with a typically higher level of trust in the government. Strong majorities of Republicans and unaffiliated voters are opposed.

Earlier results showed support for the program at just 26%. However, the increase in support is likely the result of question wording. In the earlier data, the program was described as being for “national security.” The new question describes it as being used in the “fight against terrorism.”

However, only 26% now believe it is necessary to collect data on millions of ordinary Americans to fight terrorism. Sixty-four percent (64%) believe it would be better to narrow the program so that it monitors only those with ties to terrorists or suspected terrorists....

Just 24% of voters currently trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.  Forty-seven percent (47%) occasionally trust the feds, while 28% rarely or never offer such trust.

"'They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,' the then-anonymous Snowden told reporters as his leaks first emerged."

"Well, so can Google. And Facebook. And most companies’ internal networks. Creepy? You bet. Calamitous? Not so clear."

Daniel Ellsberg says Snowden is a “hero.” Let me suggest a different prism through which to view that term. Somewhere in the intelligence community is another 29-year-old computer whiz whose name we’ll never know. That person joined the government after 9/11 because she felt inspired to serve the nation in its hour of need. For years she’s sweated to perfect programs that can sort through epic reams of data to identify potential threats. Some Americans are alive today because of her work.

As one security analyst put it this week, to find a needle in a haystack, you need the haystack. If we’re going to romanticize a young nerd in the intelligence world, my Unknown Coder trumps the celebrity waiting in Hong Kong for Diane Sawyer’s call any day.

"The more stuff like this is in the public domain, we’ll still catch terrorists, but it will be the stupid terrorists."

After the revelations, "The guys we should really be worried about will be far less likely to be swept up in this effort."

That from former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden, who says: "It’s kind of Darwinian."

Drudge at his best: "Wanna Come to Russia?"

That links to a Guardian story with the far less ominous heading: "Edward Snowden: Russia offers to consider asylum request/Vladimir Putin's spokesman says any appeal for asylum from whistleblower who fled US will be looked at 'according to facts.'"

Drudge's attitude is shown by other links at the top right now.

Above Putin's image: "Democrats Love Gov't Surveillance -- As Long As It's Obama, Not Bush..." (which is about the same WaPo-Pew poll that we're talking about here).

At the top of the left-hand column is: "Plan B: In latenight announcement, Obama allows morning-after abortion pill for under-17s..." (which makes it look like Obama is trying to woo us over into women's issues), "UPDATE: Soldier Who Read Conservative Books Faces Charges..." (more political bias in the exercise of power), and "US Ambassador to Belgium 'Solicited Prostitutes, Including Minors': State Dept IG..." (the new scandal).

The middle column begins with 3 headlines about terrorism in airports, and then another story about  political bias in the exercise of power: "Audio: IRS agent tells pro-life group: 'Keep your faith to yourself'..."

The right-hand column is devoted to the NSA story, pairing a Republican — "Boehner: NSA Leaker a 'Traitor'..." — with a Democrat — "AL FRANKEN: 'There Are Certain Things Appropriate For Me To Know That Is Not Appropriate For Bad Guys To Know'..."

"She just showed a bit of motherly love. She just did what any mother would have done."

"She felt that could have been me lying down there in the street. She just felt for the poor guy. No man should have to die like that in the street with no-one around him. She came home afterwards and she just sat down and had a cup of coffee. But she doesn't want to talk about it. She did what she did and wants to get on with her life again. Of course she is upset, it was a gory thing for anyone to see. But she just wants to get on with things."

ADDED: We are admiring these women, but implicit in our admiration is the question — let's speak it out loud — Where are the men?

"British police have arrested two men on a Pakistan Airlines airplane after RAF Typhoon fighter jets escorted it from Manchester Airport to Stansted Airport near London."

"The plane was carrying 297 passengers from Lahore when it was rerouted. The Pakistani plane... was diverted over York and escorted back out over the North Sea and down the cost to Stansted...."

"In our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your governments they don't care about you."

"You think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start busting our guns you think politicians are going to die? No it's going to be the average guy, like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so can all live in peace."

ADDED: "They... stood around, waving knives and a gun, asking people nearby to take pictures of them 'as if they wanted to be on TV or something.... In my opinion, they were waiting for the police to arrive to be shot by the police. That's the only thing I can think.'"

"How Twitter Is Messing With Al-Qaeda's Careful PR Machine."

"Individual jihadis are increasingly taking to social media with their own opinions, sparking disputes within the terrorist organization."

It's a marketplace of ideas. As Justice Holmes famously said:

If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition.... But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

Good luck shopping.