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If you woke up this morning thinking, "I really need to hear NPR's Linda Wertheimer say the words 'noisily unwrapping her Twizzlers,'" have I got good news for you.

Margot Adler had a story on today's Morning Edition about Broadway audiences and whether they're getting ruder, given recent incidents involving the aforementioned Twizzlers, rude texting, talking and other interruptions. She went to the TKTS line (where you wait for discount Broadway tickets) and asked some of the folks what they thought.

Some offered the usual explanations — say, that we're all used to sitting in our living rooms watching alone, and we don't remember what it's like to use our polite-company manners anymore. One speculated that as theater has gotten more casual (less dressy, drinks allowed), people's behavior has lost its polite formality.

Jan Simpson, the writer of one blog about Broadway, actually calls herself "old-fashioned" for wanting people to sit quietly while watching a show, which I can tell you caused the writer of one blog about popular culture to clutch her metaphorical pearls in horror at the thought that there's something modern about being a disruptive buffoon. Adler acknowledges that in fact, "in Shakespeare's time, they threw food on the stage." Of course, in Shakespeare's time, they died of various things we've cured, so let's not embrace that too eagerly.

What emerges is partly a generational issue setting younger audiences who want to tweet about the show while it's happening (mon dieu!) against older, perhaps more experienced audiences who take a less consumer-oriented and more art-patron-oriented approach to attendance. But surely, a person of any age is capable of doing without Twitter for a couple of hours. I can do without Twitter for a couple of hours, for example, and I've been known to tweet about people clipping their nails on the Metro.

It's a good thing, indeed, to avoid taking theater and making it a cloistered place for elites only (not that ticket prices don't get you a good part of the way there). But it's also a good thing to avoid giving free passes out of Rudeness Jail for everyone who simply prefers not to iron anything except cargo shorts.

OK, OK, I don't really care if you wear cargo shorts. But the pockets should not be stuffed with things that beep, smoke, smell like garlic or tempt you to whisper.

Deal?

As the controversy over the National Security Agency's phone and Internet data gathering reminds us, one of Congress's most challenging assignments is oversight of the nation's intelligence community.

Keeping tabs on that the part of the federal government which constantly invokes national security to justify its opaqueness has its obvious difficulties and frustrations regardless of which party controls the House or Senate.

Those frustrations came through in a conversation I had with Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, who has served on the House Intelligence Committee for six years. She's the top Democrat on the Intelligence oversight subcommittee.

How challenging is it for lawmakers to do oversight of the intelligence community given all the secrecy? I asked.

SCHAKOWSKY: "There's a number of challenges for all of us on the Intelligence Committee because all of us, maybe with the exception of the chairman and ranking member who may spend most of their time dealing with the issues of the Intelligence Committee, most of the rest of us are definitely part-timers. We work on other committees.

So the responsibility of oversight of 16 intelligence agencies, including the huge ones of the CIA and the FBI and the NSA, it's a tremendous responsibility. And yet the cards are stacked against us in many ways, in terms of doing a really good job, particularly for the rank and file.

"Often it's just the chairman and ranking member on both the House and the Senate intelligence committees that are fully read into all the classified information and the covert operations. So we're not always fully up to date and fully briefed on everything."

Call Me Kuchu

Director: Katherine Fairfax Wright, Malika Zouhali-Worrall

Genre: Documentary, Drama

Running Time: 87 minutes

With: David Kato, Christopher Senyonjo

(Recommended)

To: The National Security Agency

From: The Protojournalist

Subject: Please feel free to read our email exchange with Wendy Nather, a hightech analyst who focuses on security issues at 451 Research in Austin, Texas. Not that you need our permission.

Dear Wendy Nather,

I am writing a blogpost for NPR's website about legitimate paranoia when it comes to life online. After seeing your thoughtful piece about PRISM [the U.S. government's Internet-monitoring program] on the Dark Reading website. I hoped you might be able to elevate the story.

Perhaps the NSA is not really monitoring our day-to-day dealings with websites. But are there other types of people who are keeping an eye on our online engagements — identity thieves, webcam hijackers, insurance detectives, people who want to obtain information about our online habits and use that information for their own benefit?

Wendy Nather's Reply

I don't think it's a matter of being too paranoid, so much as knowing which things are more appropriate to be paranoid about. :-)

One of the things that we have lost with the Internet is the ability not to be singled out. It used to be that you had to work hard to gather information on one person, even if that data was publicly available somehow: you had to go to offices, to the library, search newspaper archives, etc. But now all you have to do is decide that you want to research someone, and the searching takes only minutes or a couple of hours if you know what you're doing.

This is the difference between what we traditionally understand as our Fourth Amendment rights and what advertisers, the government, law enforcement, and entities of any kind are able to do today. They can gather aggregate information on huge populations, and you might be in there — but if someone decides to query your data individually, is that the part that constitutes "unreasonable search"? Is just possessing the data considered a search? Or is it when they construct the database query that brings up your name and your data together for intentional viewing? We don't know, and that's the very thin dividing line that used to be thicker.

So yes, anyone can search out your information for different reasons. The only question is the probability of that happening. You should probably be most concerned about anyone who would have a reason to want to single you out:

Angry exes

Employers (or potential ones)

Anyone who wants to validate information about you (such as a public assertion you've made, or a benefit you've applied for)

Curious family or friends (my mother has had a Google Alert on me for years ;-)

Anyone who is investigating someone you're connected to in some way (law enforcement, government agencies)

Anyone else who is angry enough with you to want retribution, and who is the type to be able to do it online

Yes, we should be worried about credit card fraud, which is different from identity theft. The former is done in bulk today, without discrimination, as opposed to the latter, which is often done by someone who has reason to know more of your biographical data to make the identity theft more complete.

In my opinion, the general population should not be too worried about being singled out. However, the fact that the government is collecting the type of data already that makes it even easier to do just that, at the drop of a hat, is something that we as a society should discuss. We should figure out how to make the barrier higher to being singled out, as opposed to making the barrier higher to collecting our data, because that's already too late.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Wendy Nather