Thursday, November 08, 2007
You are what you eat, continued...
The following is a little piece that came down from Wired, somehow. I’m not sure how it arrived. I’m pretty sure the reportage is factual: I mean this is just stupid and bureaucratic (which I realize is redundant) enough to be real.
God help us all.
WIRED: WATCH WHAT THEY EAT
When word broke in 2002 that the feds were picking out terror suspects based on what they ordered for dinner, most observers figured it was a glitch during the War on Terror's beta test — a one-time overreach. Turns out the strategy has been employed again.
"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," CQ's Jeff Stein reports.
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…
But at least it's refinement to the 2002 version of the technique. Back then, federally-employed data-mining software labeled someone as a potential terrorist "if you were a person who frequently ordered pizza and paid with a credit card."
God help us all.
WIRED: WATCH WHAT THEY EAT
When word broke in 2002 that the feds were picking out terror suspects based on what they ordered for dinner, most observers figured it was a glitch during the War on Terror's beta test — a one-time overreach. Turns out the strategy has been employed again.
"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," CQ's Jeff Stein reports.
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…
But at least it's refinement to the 2002 version of the technique. Back then, federally-employed data-mining software labeled someone as a potential terrorist "if you were a person who frequently ordered pizza and paid with a credit card."
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