Falafel tracking fails to uncover any terrorist plots

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No terrorists in this one...but there are still four more to check!
Image from Sugar and Spice.

A short-lived FBI program that sought to ferret out Iranian operatives in the Bay Area by tracking sales of Middle Eastern food items in local grocery stores has apparently not yielded any results:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, 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.

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.

Well, given some of the other things people have been put on the terrorist watch list for (like having the name "Robert Johnson"), it's not that ridiculous. But it certainly should be illegal.

Wow. To think that the FBI was poring over my Trader Joe's receipts and wondering if the hummus I bought meant I was an Iranian agent. (OK, maybe not my receipts; I don't live in the South Bay area.) Did they ever stop to ask themselves whether Iranian agents bought groceries in a different manner than anyone else from that part of the world?

I hope this story is not representative of our domestic counter-terrorism efforts. If so, we're in big trouble. Life under the Bush administration: increased government intrusiveness, but it's done in such a stupid way that it doesn't provide any security benefits.

Comments

ST said…
And I bet the guys who came up with that brilliant idea get paid more than me. Damn.
7:14 AM, November 08, 2007
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