FromCQ Politics, by way of Firedoglake, I see an allegation that the FBI has discovered a new way to identify terrorists: the deadly Trail of Tahini.

[T]he 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.

Since I regularly eat an entire tub of roasted garlic hummous with my index finger while standing in front of an open refrigerator, I am probably on their shoot-on-sight list by now.

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