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Eating falafel could be a sign of being a terrorist

Call it inept? Stupid? The FBI has been hard at it trying to track down possible terrorists. It's just that it has been caught out at being plain dumb - once again. Wired Blog Network reports:

"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 didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal."

As Wired concludes its piece:

"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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