In a May, 2006 post entitled Codename: Miranda, I joked about having my grocery purchases linked to another Chicagoan due to poor schema design.
There, I joked about buying:
… granola, yogurt, hummus — the healthy stuff which probably alerts Admiral Poindexter’s Bayesian classifier to my fifth-column status.
Maybe this wasn’t jocular after all, as a Congressional Quarterly article (referred to by Ryan Singel) 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.
I hope Miranda is not in Gitmo as a result of my healthy eating habits.
It gets better. If this data-mining did happen, I’m willing to bet a few beers that the credit card companies were in on it.
Anyone wanna take my bet? ;)
Is that involved as in ‘did the work,’ or ‘are passing all sorts of detailed data to the Feds?’
For the purposes of a few beers, lets say passing a ton of detailed info onto the feds.
If I’m wrong, I get to sleep well knowing my credit card transactions haven’t been given to the NSA. If I’m right, you buy me a few beers. It’s a win-win either way for me ;)
I like the way you structure your bets, but only when I’m not the one paying up.