I swear, if I saw this in a movie, I'd turn off the DVD on the grounds that it was just too stupid to be worth wasting my time.
Firedoglake, The Falafel Squad,
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.
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.
A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails….
But I don't watch movies that dumb.
UPDATE (11/9): FBI Denies Data Mining Grocery Records
I was stunned to see that this appeared in The Congressional Quarterly, not in The Onion.
You really can’t do satire any more.