How about this: The NYPD is trolling for terrorists on the Internet — and that somehow offends the Associated Press.
The AP, of course, sees a civil-rights violation lurking in every city shadow — but hyperventilating over the Internet?
It’s true.
The agency got its hands on a leaked document from 2006 that shows a cyberintelligence officer was monitoring blogs and Web sites run by the Muslim Student Associations at Rutgers, Yale and 13 other schools in New York and the Northeast.
The cops didn’t hack anyone’s e-mail account — they just went online and visited public sites that everyone can access.
It’s common-sense work and entirely legal, too: Federal guidelines allow the NYPD to access the ’Net just like civilians, in order to develop intelligence and prevent attacks.
That is, whatever you can Google, the NYPD is free to Google, too.
And let’s be blunt: Anything less would be malpractice of the highest order.
It’s invaluable work: The Web has unique potential as a vehicle for encouraging — and radicalizing — young men.
Just this month, New York’s own Jesse Curtis Morton, a 33-yead-old jihadist the feds tied to a string of terror cases, pleaded guilty to making threats on his Web site.
Even more dangerous are people like Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army major who was radicalized by watching the YouTube sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the firebrand preacher (who, happily, met his maker last year as the result of an American drone strike in Yemen).
Extremists have made a special home for themselves online — so it’s all to the good that the NYPD is staying alert.
And there’s a reason the NYPD has its eyes open here: The MSA has hundreds of branches across the country today, but was originally founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, which the US government has classified as a terrorist group. (Jesse Curtis Morton tried to indoctrinate members of his MSA chapter while a college student.)
According to the AP, the NYPD took note when one MSA leader at the University of Buffalo recommended in 2006 that some of her fellow students attend an Islamic conference in Toronto that December.
The 2005 meeting had hosted a motivational speaker who doubles as a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and who was later listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial; the 2006 conference featured another unindicted co-conspirator in that case.
Enough to catch the eye of any dedicated counterterror operative? We’d say so.
We also doubt that the AP is finished.
But it should know that it’s looking more than just a little silly.