

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.

* 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.

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."

Persian-American technology scribe Cyrus Farivar, for one, is not amused.