CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Apple ramps up privacy – now all iOS apps must encrypt web connections by year end.

JOHN SCHINDLER: Unraveling the Orlando Horror.

It’s apparent that Mateen was able to get away with years of violent statements and threats due to a pervasive fear of Islamophobia. It even derailed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mateen’s bizarre statements to co-workers, including claims that he belonged to an international terrorist group, got the FBI’s attention, and in 2013 the Bureau opened a formal investigation into him.

That investigation lasted ten months and included the employment of confidential informants and wiretaps on Mateen, as well as two interviews with the security guard, but ultimately closed without adding Omar Mateen to any permanent list of suspected terrorists in the United States.

The FBI ultimately concluded that Mateen was a fantasist more than a terrorist. Although he claimed to have joined multiple terrorist groups, there was no evidence to back any of that up. To top it off, the FBI concluded that Mateen was engaging in bizarre behavior due to “co-workers discriminating against him and teasing him because he was Muslim.” In 2014, the FBI opened a second investigation into Mateen and reached the same conclusion: he was a fantasist not a jihadist.

People at the FBI need to acquaint themselves with Lee Harris and “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.” Fantasy is specifically what makes jihadis so dangerous.

IRONY IS DEAD: An anti-terrorism lecture from… Bill Ayers?

ASIA PIVOT: Association of Southeast Asian Nations issues stern statement against Chinese militarization of the South China Sea, but you won’t believe what happened next:

Less than three hours after the ASEAN statement was released by the Malaysian Foreign Ministry, a spokeswoman retracted the document, saying that “urgent amendments” were needed. By the end of the evening, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had made his own statement refuting the contention that the South China Sea dispute was a sticking point between his country and the regional body as a whole.

“This isn’t an issue between China and ASEAN,” he said. “Cooperation between China and ASEAN is far greater than any specific discord, including the South China Sea dispute.”

That may be. China, after all, is ASEAN’s largest trading partner. One senior regional diplomat told TIME that, in the busy minutes after the ASEAN statement went out, Beijing had lobbied regional ministers to make the embarrassing backtrack. Beijing’s foreign-policy makers, he said, had specifically pressured Laos, which is this year’s ASEAN chair, to force the statement’s recall. (ASEAN requires consensus among all of its 10 members to issue any statement.)

“When the dragon roars, the little countries need to stay away from the fire coming out of its mouth,” says the diplomat. “We have no choice but to acknowledge this political reality.”

The ASEAN nations can hang together, or they can hang separately.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Israel’s new ‘RoBattle’ bot is built with swappable modules that change its abilities.

Single-purpose battle bots are so 2015.

SWINGING LONDON, BABY: London’s new Muslim mayor takes aim at sexy subway ads.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Writer who doesn’t like AR-15s doesn’t like AR-15s.

I’ve shot pistols before, but never something like an AR-15. Squeeze lightly on the trigger and the resulting explosion of firepower is humbling and deafening (even with ear protection).

The recoil bruised my shoulder. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary case of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.

Even in semi-automatic mode, it is very simple to squeeze off two dozen rounds before you even know what has happened. In fully automatic mode, it doesn’t take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel.

Other than the fact that Gersh Kuntzman was apparently holding the rifle incorrectly, firing it incorrectly, made an incorrect (and shameful) claim about having PTSD, was incorrect that Mateen used an AR-15 in the Orlando terror attack, and was incorrect about being able to purchase a fully automatic “tactical machine gun,” this is a totally accurate piece he’s written for the Daily News.

UPDATE (Ed): In response to Kuntzman’s article. Ed Morrissey tweets on his experiences at Bullets and Bourbon last year. “Quite frankly, I was surprised at the mild recoil and report while firing an AR-15 for the first time in December.” He didn’t look like he was hurting much immediately afterwards, either:

Sign up here and find out for yourself this December!

WORLD’S TINIEST VIOLIN: ObamaCare co-op founder suing to get back money taken to prop up Big Insurance companies.

HIS HONORARY MEMBERSHIP CARD WILL BE DELIVERED POSTHUMOUSLY: Does It Matter if Orlando Jihadist Was a ‘Member’ of ISIS?

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

GOOD LORD: Omar Mateen’s wife Noor Salman went with him to Pulse nightclub and to buy ammo, might face criminal charges.

Officials told NBC News Noor Zahi Salman, Mateen’s second wife, might face criminal charges for failing to tell authorities what she knew before the Sunday attack.

Salman said she was with Mateen as he bought ammo and a holster. She also took him to Pulse at least once to scope it out, according to NBC. But Salman said she tried talking her husband out of a violent attack.

Salman was spotted Tuesday for the first time since the massacre — shielding her face from news cameras as she left the Florida home she once shared with the madman.

Little is known about Salman at this point, other than that she previously lived in Chicago after growing up and attending law school in the San Francisco Bay Area.

WATERGATESKI: Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.

Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.

The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.

The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some GOP political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.

Of course Moscow got the really juicy stuff off of Hillary Clinton’s personal and illegal email server years ago.

CLAIM: Saudi Arabia Has Funded 20% Of Hillary’s Presidential Campaign, Saudi Crown Prince Claims.

On the plus side, maybe this means as President she’ll undo the Iran Deal.

QUESTIONS ASKED: Chick Fil A Did WHAT After Gay Club Shooting? Why Isn’t This Viral?

In a shocking move, the Orlando location at University and Rouse Road fired up its grills on Sunday. The chain is notorious for not being open, ever, on the first day of the week. Employees cooked up hundreds of their famous chicken sandwiches. They brewed dozens of gallons of sweet tea.

Then, instead of making a single dime, they crated the product of their labor to the One Blood donation center. The food and drinks were handed out, free of charge, to all the people who had lined up to donate blood.

So far, the only mentions of the incident have been from individuals on Facebook. They have posted photos thanking the restaurant for their thoughtfulness and generosity.

This story doesn’t fit The Narrative and must be ignored.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, on the tolerant Left…

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Maine senators King and Collins back gun sale ban based on terror ‘watch lists’

Perhaps the Senators’ Fourth Amendment rights should be subject to ill-defined “good behavior” rules.

BUT OF COURSE: The murder of two police officials by a man claiming allegiance to so-called Islamic State (IS) is “unquestionably a terrorist act”, President Francois Hollande says.

The French aren’t deflecting blame with euphemisms like “homegrown extremism.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. “Forget the tie; your dad wants beer this Father’s Day”

FLYIN’ HIGH: These Three Senators Bust the Budget on Air Travel.

Sen. Charles Schumer spent $292,000 in public money flying private airplanes last year. His protégé Sen. Kristen Gillibrand spent more than $150,000 on charter travel.

The two New York Democrats were the top spenders on private air travel between October 2014 and September 2015, an analysis of Senate office-account records shows.

Third place is held by a lawmaker from the other side of the political aisle and the other side of the country: Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming spent more than $75,000 in the last fiscal year flying charters.

Frequent charter flyers are the exceptions in the current Senate. Few senators regularly sprung for luxury corporate travel in the 2014-2015 period. Schumer and Gillibrand stood out from their colleagues in another way: by racking up the largest credit card late fees in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Must be nice.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: After Orlando, Dem Katie McGinty hammers Pat Toomey over anti-terror gun bill.

McGinty called on Toomey to now support the measure in the aftermath of the Orlando massacre, hours after Senate Democrats promised to bring the plan back up for debate.

“Pat Toomey has worked to allow suspected terrorists to buy guns in this country and that is just an outrageous position,” McGinty, challenging Toomey in one of the country’s most critical Senate races, said in a telephone interview. “Of all the kind of tough issues, this one should not be a tough call.”

Before electing her to the Senate, Pennsylvania voters might want to ask Katie McGinty what other constitutionally protected rights she would suspend under mere suspicion.

DON’T DO STUPID SH*T: Orlando Terrorist Worked for Same Security Contractor That Has Been Moving Illegal Aliens Into U.S. by the Vanload.

UPDATE: Glenn’s point from last night, that Mateen “escaped scrutiny because people were afraid of seeming racist or something,” seems particularly apt now.

SEEMS TO? Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting.

That’s smarter politically Obama trying to connect the jihadi terror attack to “homegrown extremism.”

Except of course to members of the Permanent Handwringing Class.

MEANWHILE, IN CHICAGO: 3 dead, 17 wounded in shootings citywide.

OBAMA: Orlando shooting was a case of ‘homegrown extremism,’ gunman inspired by online propaganda.

Obama said Monday that it appeared the shooting was a case of “homegrown extremism,” saying that so far investigators have found no connections between the gunman and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, or any other extremist groups.

“It appears the shooter was inspired by various extremist information that was disseminated over the Internet,” Obama said during remarks in the Oval Office.

An Islamic jihadi inspired by a self-described Caliphate in the Middle East is an example of “homegrown extremism,” because somehow, some way it’s always our fault.

QUESTION ASKED: Is the West about to repeat its mistakes in Libya?

That may depend entirely on whether the Clinton who made the first mistakes wins the White House.

WILLIAM SALETAN: Trump’s Response to Orlando Is Exactly What ISIS Wants.

Actually, what ISIS seems to want is a lot of dead, gay Westerners.