[Infowarrior] - FBI Data Mined Grocery Stores

[Richard Forno]

"Total Falafel Awareness" anyone????



First Pizza, Now Falafel as Tell-Tale Sign of Terror
By Noah Shachtman EmailNovember 06, 2007

When word broke in 2002 that the feds were picking out terror suspects based
on what they ordered for dinner, most observers figured it was a glitch
during the War on Terror's beta test -- a one-time overreach.  Turns out the
strategy has been employed again.

"The FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area
grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern
food would lead to Iranian terrorists," CQ's Jeff Stein reports.

    The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other
data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San
Jose area.

    The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and
Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn¹t last
long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI¹s criminal investigations
division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist
list for what they ate was ridiculous ‹ and possibly illegal.

But at least it's refinement to the 2002 version of the technique. Back
then, federally-employed data-mining software labeled someone as a potential
terrorist "if you were a person who frequently ordered pizza and paid with a
credit card."

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http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/11/httpblogsabcnew.html