I regularly eat a falafel and hummus pita for lunch. The nice folks at the Daily Grind stock a neatly-packaged offering from Med Deli. I was a bit startled, then, to see this news item via jwz:
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.
A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails.
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson would neither confirm nor deny that the bureau ran such data mining, or forward-leaning “domain management,” experiments, but said he would continue to investigate.
*golf clap*
{ 2 } Comments
omg that is just beyond ridiculous.
@Kristina
I posted it on metafilter, too:
mefi link
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[...] like slashdot picked up the falafel sales story from the same source jwz used, plus wired, c|net. Rock on, jwz. [...]
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