Gastronomical Threat Modeling (Follow the Falafel)
November 9th, 2007
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.l
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.
I imagine I would have been one of those student radicals they worry so much about. We use to do "Falafel runs" to Mamoun's Falafel after midnight in NYC when I was in college. If they've sifted through his receipts from a decade ago, I'm on the radar.
Let them go through my stomach, I have nothing to hide.
Beware though, some have pointed out that falafel is often called " Israel's national dish. So, of course, the Jews are behind it... the falafel sales that is.
I have worked with predictive data mining applications in retail. It still disturbs me at how good it worked - for determining what someone would by, not who they would attack, how or when. Sorry, but when you're clustering your customer, I don't think you'll end up with a Terrorist Cluster.
If you're in to being on the falafel watch list, this blog has caught my attention recently - Arabic Bites. I drool with every new post.
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