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From the small amount of reading I've done

Therein lies your problem.

Oh thank goodness! I assume then that you can point me at something to read which answers my question?

The Koran is not a simple document, and as with the Bible, you can take single sentence quotes out of context and justify almost anything.
Here some other quotes from the Koran for you that take the opposite tack.
http://www.courierpress.com/li...

I'm sorry, but I'm not buying the primary argument here — that this level of surveillance is necessary in order to catch terrorists. (Never mind that it took this scandal leaking for Obama to actually say "terrorists".)

Are terrorists actually stupid enough to communicate using public services like this? You'd think that, at the very least, they'd be using Tor, or their own private equivalents. More likely than not, they're not even communicating electronically; Bin Laden communicated with the outside world through a very non-electronic trusted courier.

It seems to me that their argument is a red herring — that their real purpose is surveilling us, for partisan/corrupt purposes. Witness the harassment of Tea Party groups by the IRS, journalists by the Attorney General, and the NYPD's abuse of that data.

Online ordering is usually done from one location, usually home. When corporations act as the police-by-proxy, then you have situations like AT&T funneling your internet activity to the NSA, 80 year old grandmothers and printers being sued for 50 million by the RIAA, and finally the cameras of every public establishment are tracking your movements and purchase activity, in real time, funneling your real-life activity to the local Fusion Center.

In a sense, them knowing your internet activity is far less creepy because you're usually in that one place when you're on. The involuntary plate scans and the continuous tracking that will inevitably follow you wherever you go is no different than a gang of lackeys on the phone with the police following you around all day, which in a sane universe would be called harassment. One could at least not bother to buy stuff over the internet or even use it at all. But if you want to drive you have to have a car, with a license plate, and you gotta buy gas to drive it and have your plate recorded by every camera you drive across. Paying cash will not help when they can still get the plates and their locations.

And don't give me any righteous bullshit about public transportation. Try spending 5 hours a day getting to and from your job and them come and tell me how cool public transportation is.

The U.S. does not de jure claim jurisdiction outside its borders. If Boeing sell you a jet, and the contract stipulates that you are to pay an advance in gold and then a final payment in gold, they can sue you and the gold clause will not be enforced. Boeing would be forced to receive your payment in legal tender.

International comerce is not hampered (much) by this, as the States themselves are in a state of anarchy with respect to each other and cannot enforce a legal tender in each other's territory.

The raid on the private currency producer Liberty dollar should be some evidence http://www.courierpress.com/news/2007/nov/15/liberty-dollar-office-raided/

Most of the ghosts look more like JPEG artifacts (eg. ringing and smoothing) than actual ghosts. To make this a serious endeavor, they need to take the IR filter off the camera and set the JPEG quality factor to maximum.

The rest look like they were done in Photoshop. One of them has such sharp lines on the "blurry ghost area" that it seems to be a rather obvious fake. (If the blurry area were that sharply delineated in real life, then there would've been more artifacts in the JPEG.)

Given the nature of it all, this looks more like a PR stunt than anything else. Welcome to the Web 1999!

At least one of these pictures (blurry near the camera) really looks pretty good. I can see the arms holding a paper on the desk. Enlarge it in The Gimp if you have to, and compare it to any other picture. I did.

Of course, it could be faked. It looks like there's nothing to stop that. But I checked it against another file, the JPEG headers look the same (creator info and stuff) and the file size jives, too. So maybe it's real. Or maybe everyone uses Photoshop to fake their ghost pictures. :)

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pb Reply rather than vaguely moderate me.

This page has pictures that people have submitted who claim to have spotted the ghost. Having made every effort to try not to be overly cynical, I must say that those pictures combined with their comments make for the dumbest reading ever. This would likely be more interesting to an individual with vision impairment than it is to me, because I can clearly see that there isn't a ghost.. they'd have to squint or take the ignorant folks' words for it. People appear to be seeing ghosts in the graphic compression algorithm (blocky images in certain places), not to mention some outright hallucination.

At first glance it seems as though this is some public service to people who are ghost-seeking folks. But, then you scroll down and see ad banners and (at least to me) it all clicks. They want tons of people to spend their entire day sitting on their web site looking at the "ghost cam" as it refreshes every 30 seconds, building up tons of impressions. Okay, don't think I'm pretending that 90% of Slashdot readers didn't realize this.. but for those of you who are too skeptical to even go look at the Ghost Cam (or when everyone wakes up in the morning in the US and the site dies), I think my explanation is pretty valid.

Another thing that's interesting is that all of the "comments" on the proof page seem strikingly similar. Without knowing anything else I'd say that most of them were fabricated. Who knows? I think I have an extreme aversion to anything on the Net with a central theme of "ghosts". Except maybe GhostView.