09 Nov 2007 @ 6:27 PM 
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.l

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.

cqpolitics.com

I imagine I would have been one of those student radicals they worry so much about. We use to do “Falafel runs” to Mamoun’s Falafel after midnight in NYC when I was in college. If they’ve sifted through his receipts from a decade ago, I’m on the radar.

Let them go through my stomach, I have nothing to hide.

Beware though, some have pointed out that falafel is often called ” Israel’s national dish. So, of course, the Jews are behind it… the falafel sales that is.

I have worked with predictive data mining applications in retail. It still disturbs me at how good it worked – for determining what someone would by, not who they would attack, how or when. Sorry, but when you’re clustering your customer, I don’t think you’ll end up with a Terrorist Cluster.

If you’re in to being on the falafel watch list, this blog has caught my attention recently -Arabic Bites. I drool with every new post.

Posted By: drapetomaniac
Last Edit: 18 Mar 2009 @ 06:29 PM

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