{"id":198471,"date":"2007-11-06T22:50:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-07T03:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/11\/06\/weapons-of-mass-digestion\/"},"modified":"2007-11-06T22:50:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-07T03:50:00","slug":"weapons-of-mass-digestion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/11\/06\/weapons-of-mass-digestion\/","title":{"rendered":"Weapons of Mass Digestion*"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Your tax dollars at work.<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p><span style=\"font-size:130%;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/cqpolitics.com\/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&amp;docID=hsnews-000002620892\">FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size:85%;\">By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor<\/span><br \/>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn\u2019t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI\u2019s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous \u2014 and possibly illegal.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If Mudd and Hulon are still working for the FBI, something is deeply wrong.<\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size:85%;\">That title is not my idea.  It comes from the guy who runs <a href=\"http:\/\/mynumo.com\/\">MyNuMo<\/a>, who, like everyone on the bloody internet, writes better than I do.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your tax dollars at work. FBI Hoped to Follow Falafel Trail to Iranian Terrorists Here By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security EditorLike 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 &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,972,1041,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-justice","category-law-enforcement-misconduct","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}