A critical detail absent from the summary is that these tweets took place weeks before their trip -- they weren't done at the airport.

This itself I find interesting. This isn't just the TSA involved here, you have to have some of the U.S.'s intelligence apparatus involved, possibly including the NSA(for capture of communications). This essentially exposes the fact that U.S. intelligence has the capability of taking minor tweets (and no doubt other forms of internet communications), correlating them with the real-life identities of their authors, and matching them to people entering the U.S. These statements weren't made where TSA statements could hear them. That the TSA agents knew about them at all implies some sort of ECHELONish mechanism for collecting even minor tweets such as this and matching them to people entering the U.S.

To some degree, this isn't surprising. Give a government organization the task of keeping terrorists out, and this is the type of capability you would expect them to develop. But why 'spend' this kind of capability on such a minor, harmless target? This implies to me a couple of things:

1. Over reliance on technology vs use of actual human analysis or review. An actual human analyst might well have spotted the cultural references and noted that they were harmless. The implication seems to be that intelligence collected via technical means are presented directly to minor TSA agents who don't have the training or analysis skills to correctly understand them. This is likely done to speed up 'getting the information to where it needs to be used', but increases the risk of failure due to poor quality of information or interpretation..
2. Is it possible to go from a tweet to the real-life identity of the sender in this kind of time-frame (hooking up a tweet to the identity of a person entering the country within a week or two) without the cooperation of Twitter? Note that there's no questioning if they got it right - the couple in question acknowledge they actually sent the tweets.

Finally, does anyone else get the feel of something out of Person of Interest, except that the computer isn't actually capable of spotting malicious intent?

It might not have been matched on the phone number. If you're both on Facebook and friended, it might have pulled the information from Facebook (assuming your friend has also set up the Facebook app (which comes by default in some Android phones)).

Perhaps, but man of us who work with computers (where words do have rather rigid meanings,) do so because we are not really very good at dealing with ambiguous wording.

And yet, the computer industry seems to be one of those who tend to produce conflicting uses of words (I have long maintained that to keep up with computers, you have to have the ability to keep multiple sets of conflicting vocabulary in your head, and keep them straight). You even see conflicting uses within the same company (e.g. two different lines of Burroughs minicomputers had conflicting semantics for the terms 'Cold Start' and 'Warm Start: on one line, Cold Start meant to bring the computer up from a power off condition and Warm Start was essentially what we now call a reboot; on the other line, Cold Start meant to erase the disk drive and load the operating system, and Warm Start meant to replace the operating system without erasing the disk. Failing to disambiguate this terminology properly could have disastrous results.). In the computer language arena, it's not at all uncommon for identical concepts to be expressed in different terminology in different languages, and at the same time seemingly identical terminology in different lanaguages refer to slightly different concepts. I begin to understand why Platonism developed. It almost seems like you've got an arena of rigidly defined concepts out there 'somewhere' that we can only access through terminology that is constantly changing and at times in conflict.

Don't even ask about division.

Indeed, being hunted down by a secretive, rogue, covert action group can just ruin your whole day.

Well, given that Microsoft currently has a marketing campaign that seems to be trying to communicate "We designed our phones to be so boring that you don't pay as much attention to it as you would pay attention to other smartphones", and is trying to present this as a good thing, it's hard to dispute that Microsoft has a marketing problem. I'm just not sure that that's their only problem.

Looks to me like it's an example of Bulverism in action.

The only morally correct way to convince someone of your position is to present the evidence (and the rationale).

Note that in general, public discourse hasn't actually engaged in this for ages. We're awash in waves of Bulverism, where the object is not to prove your position and disprove your opponent's position through rational argument, but to have your opponent's arguments dismissed on the basis of an assertion about their motives or background.

and a wooden snake?

Is it April already?

That's the problem right there: many people believe that The Daily Show is actually a legitimate news show.

I see it as more a commentary on the 'quality' (or lack thereof) of 'legitimate' news shows.

The real problem with news today (biases aside) I see as a variant of the 'confidence in your ability to listen well undermines your ability to listen well' meme. When listening, you are going to misunderstand some things. If you accept that, you'll be on the lookout for it and be ready to acknowledge your mistakes and correct your misunderstanding. Confidence that you won't misunderstand just means that you won't be on the lookout for it and will be less likely to acknowledge and correct your mistake.

I think something similar to the latter is going on with a lot of news reporting today, compounded by marketing and legal justifications for not admitting your mistakes (admitting mistakes undermines the marketing department's portrayal of your news organizations as 'reliable' and 'dependable', and the lawyers seem to have this idea that if you don't admit to error, you'll be less likely to be sued - probably self-defeating, as it will push people who would have accepted an honest apology into suing 'just to put them in their place').