Weapons of Mass Digestion*

Your tax dollars at work.

FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor
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.

...

If Mudd and Hulon are still working for the FBI, something is deeply wrong.

^*That title is not my idea. It comes from the guy who runs MyNuMo, who, like everyone on the bloody internet, writes better than I do.