Bay Area FBI agents wanting to find Iranian secret agents data-mined grocery store records in 2005 and 2006, hoping that tahini purchases would lead them to domestic terrorists, according to Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein. The head of the FBI's criminal investigations unit - Michael Mason - shut down the Total Falafel Awareness program, arguing it would be illegal to put someone on a terrorist watch list for simply sticking skewers into lamb, Stein reports.

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.

It's not clear how the FBI got the records to sift through in the first place - did grocery stores volunteer the data or get served with national security letters or the dread Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The other fun tidbit from the story - program stopper Mason is headed to a new job as head of security for Verizon. Sounds like a good hire since Verizon seems to need someone to say no to ridiculous FBI projects.

(Note: THREAT LEVEL is aware that Persian cuisine isn't falafel-dominated, but well, Stein was rolling. We know with near-certainty that tracking saffron and egglant purchases at Safeway surely would have led the feds right to the mess hall of the San Jose chapter of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.)

UPDATE 11/09: The FBI denies this program existed.

Photo: Hamed Saber

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