From CQ Politics:
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.
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. “It sounds pretty sensational to me,” he said, upon his initial review of the allegation. The techniques were briefly mentioned last year in a PBS Frontline special, “The Enemy Within”.
And as for my commentary on this story, well....
But reading further into this CQ Politics story, I found this tidbit of information:
As ridiculous as it sounds, the groceries counting scheme is a measure of how desperate the FBI is to disrupt domestic terrorism plots.
The possibility of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in the United States has drawn major attention from the FBI because of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran over Iran’s nuclear program.
“Because of the heightened difficulties surrounding U.S.-Iranian relations, the FBI has increased its focus on Hezbollah,” Bresson said 16 months ago. “Those investigations relate particularly to the potential presence of Hezbollah members on U.S. soil.”
Just this week, analyst Matthew Levitt wrote that “according to FBI officials here, some 50-100 Hamas and Hezbollah members with military training are present in the United States.” An FBI spokesman would not confirm that figure.
[The] groceries counting scheme is a measure of how desperate the FBI is to disrupt domestic terrorism plots. How much do you want to bet that it is the Bush administration that is pressuring the FBI into disrupting domestic terrorist plots? It is all about the politics of fear, by the Bush administration, for political gain. Remember the Nexus of Politics and Terror? See Keith Olbermann's two part story:
Olbermann's Nexus of Politics and Terror, Part One;
Olbermann's Nexus of Politics and Terror, Part Two;
We've got the 2008 presidential elections coming up, and the GOP may just be getting desperate at President Bush's low approval ratings, and the possibility that the Democrats may end up taking control of the White House. Already, we're starting to again see the terrorist fear card being played by the Republican Party against the Democrats. Now CQ Politics is trying to connect this FBI grocery surveillance program with the growing confrontation between the Bush administration and Iran, with the possibility of Iranian state-sponsored terrorism. I'm going to say that is crap! It is about the Bush administration's raising the sense of terrorist fears in Americans--the terrorists want to kill you! It doesn't matter to President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney whether the terrorists are Iraqi terrorists, al Qaeda terrorists, or even Iranian terrorists, just as long as they can use these terrorism threats to further their own political self-interests. And with the 2008 elections coming up, the Bush administration may be worried that the FBI has not yet disrupted any terrorism plots, that they can then politically use. Perhaps that is why the FBI is so desperate that they are investigating Falafel purchases in grocery stores.
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