Total Kebab Awareness

You may or may not remember the failed data-mining program called "Total Information Awareness." It was designed by former Iran-Contra participant John Poindexter in 2001, and was supposed to link hundreds of databases (everything from FBI records to credit cards and email records) to allow for "data-mining" on a massive scale. The program as designed was shut down due to overwhelming opposition from privacy advocates and others. Opponents pointed out that even an error rate of 0.1% would result in thousands of innocent American civilians being tagged as suspects. They also argued that such an unfocused scanning of data was next to useless. Still, the program might have survived (and in fact various aspects of it have survived) if not for it's Orwellian name and logo:
Anyway, stupid data mining projects continue:

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.

Thank god there are some FBI officials smart enough to realize both the inanity of the project and its potentially harmful effects on innocent people. So, without what one blogger has termed "Total Falafel Awareness," let's all go buy some Tahini.

Link via War and Piece