ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

The FBI ran a data-mining program in San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005-2006 in the hopes that records of sales of Middle Eastern food, like falafel, would lead to Iranian terrorists, Jeff Stein of CQ reported. The project was ultimately pulled by the head of the FBI criminal investigation's divisions, who was characterized as saying that "putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous – and possibly illegal."

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 FBI denies that sifting through consumer spending habits amounted to the kind of data mining that caused an uproar when the Pentagon was exposed doing it in 2002.