"Billy" wrote in message
"FarmI" ask@itshall be given wrote:
"Billy" wrote in message news:wildbilly-
"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.

It is symptomatic of our environment. Nobody knows if it's true, but it
sounds like our government. They spied on us illegally, and then,
retroactively passed a law that said it was OK.

And you know about that because......................?

If all that came out, do you really think the humus buying spying wouldn't
have?

I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person but I also like
to differntiate between reality and speculation. There is still no cite
(other than gossip) to support the humus spying story.


You seem to have an
honest government, at least your Prime Minister seems decent, but here
and in Europe, there has been a shift to the right since Bush. If your
computer has a web cam, I'd cover its lens when it wasn't in use. The
neighborhood has changed.

I agree that the western world has moved very far right since 9/11. But
that does not mean that the minions of the right are any more effective than
minions of the left or minions of the in betweeners.

I still have a security clearance from my government (as I still do casual
work for them) and I know that most bureaucracies are largely ineffective
and we've already got examples of that. 9/11 happened despite the enormous
resources the US puts into security. A low level military guy in Iraq
steals and expose State Department cables.

If you and Nad expect me to believe there is some degree of competence in
spooking on humus buyers then one or other of you are going to have to come
up with better proof than usenet gossip.