"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote:
"Billy" wrote in message news:wildbilly-
In article ,
"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote:

"Nad R" wrote in message

During 911 every grocery
store had to give the names of everyone that purchased humus, an arabic
food, the grocery stores complied.

Excuse my scepticism, but are you pulling our collective legs? I know
the
US does some unbelievable daft things in the name of security, but having
to
give one's name in order to buy humus is just so incedibly silly, that I
find it hard to believe.

Can you provide a cite for that?

The large stores here will give you a small discount on your grocery
purchases, if you have a card from their store. The card is bar coded
and directs the purchases of your sale to your own personal database.
The database is of course for sale, so that when someone decides to sell
widgets, there is a data base of previous widget buyers, and advertiser
can aim their advertising at you. I don't use them, Admiral Poindexter
can find out about me the hard way.

Yes, I understand that, however do you have a (semi-)reputable cite about
the humus buyers?

I know that information from buying activites can be collected and analysed
and that there may be some value in trying to identify people by purchases,
but the commitment of resources to such a potentially futile exercise is
probably beyond the tolerance for wastage of even a profligate
administration.

I also think that it would be unlikely that human resources with sufficient
sense would be available to do such a job even if the funding was there.
It's low level work but requires competent analytical skills.

You know how few people there are who post on usenet who can read a sentence
and analyse a few simple clauses in order to understand what's been said.
If the bulk of usenet posters is in any way representative of the pool of
talent in the general poupulace such a project would be very dangerous to
try to conduct.

It'd be a nightmare to oversight even if it did happen and I still have
doubts that it did happen. There should be some sniff online if it did take
place because there are implications of racial profiling and the potential
for claims of victimisation based on purchasing. It'd be a minefiled and
something that would be hard to hide and perhaps even more so in an
environment of constant conspiracy theories.

Nightmare indeed. It is more than rumored that the US has rows and rows,
floors and floors, building after building of super computers that monitor
every international phone call, every radio frequency, every email of the
entire world. What! You do not watch science fiction?

Hide what, the humus thing was on TV every other night eight years ago.

--
Enjoy Life... Nad R (Garden in zone 5a Michigan)