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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that hyperbole is possible when you're discussing the necessity of having worldwide biometric "terrorist" lists that countries like Saudi Arabia would participate in.

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edit: How would you code "terrorism through public demonstrations of driving while female" or "terrorism through being Yemen?"

"Terrorism though applying for a marriage license after being mildly critical in the WaPo."

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Finance background here.

All these PEP, sanction lists, ofac monitoring, financial sanction lists already exist and every company with a worthwile monetary turnover ever facing an audit runs these background checks.

The laws are there, they are called the aml directives, the lists are there.

And most of the entries there are provided by eitjer uk or us entities, youll usually find foreign military personells data there, dob, rank, id number, name but not much else.

It is bit of a joke as many muslim people have similar names and joe shmoes get flagged for nothing very often.

Meanwhile, the people on these lists are very high up within their own government hierarchy, they probably have 5 differe t passports.

Btw, these lists are csv files often...some sophistication.

Yea, monitor peps, fugitives and terrorists, but find a way without combing through the whole worlds innocent citizens.

> Btw, these lists are csv files often...some sophistication.

And surely this critically sensitive data is not left on a shared location with loose permissions, or sent around as an email attachment, right? ...right?

I'm worried about the ability of this data to enable authoritarianism and I'm also worried about it being handled by those with the competence of the average government official.

"Never blame on malice what you can blame on stupidity", however the problem is government has both of those in spades.

Critical sensitive data? You can access the lists directly in several different formats, all publically available... Wouldn't be much of a sanctions list if you couldn't

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-sanctio...

Sanctioned persons are not the same as politically exposed persons. You are still allowed to do business with PEPs.

Those are blacklists, i.e. known criminals. The US is asking for whitelists, i.e. everyone and without motives

No it isn’t. There is no bulk access, just responses to queries of biometric data for persons of interest.

That "just" is holding an enormous weight there, friend. Have you seen the query responses themselves to know whether they're not not getting back bulk info? And have you seen the giant private-public systems they'll want to funnel this info into?

Just from my own research on surveillance, I got back a bunch of records in a FOIA lawsuit that included the the query results of a bunch of license plate scans. Large XML blobs. For whatever reason, they didn't redact a few thousand pages of those query results.

A lot more info was in those query responses than you'd imagine. For example, SSNs of people whose license plates matched the first three digits of a "person of interest"'s car.

Mind you, this was after them arguing for months, with affidavits, that they don't have audit logs. So, yeah.

Sure, sure, and the query looks like:

  SELECT * FROM Person JOIN Biometric_Datum ON Person.id = Biometric_Datum.person_id;

See, no bulk access. Just a response to a query, only once an day, or so.

On the related topic of Arabic names, I currently visiting Tunisia. The other day I asked one of my friends how to spell her name using Latin letters, and she said “you can use one C, two Cs, one K, it doesn’t matter.” Now I’m wondering how many people have problems because their names have been casually spelled a few different ways and linked to someone else’s name in accident.

It has already happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives

The US doesn't care: if your name seems to match a terrorist's, you are that terrorist.

This is a problem with all transliterated languages.

It’s worse for Arabs because until modern times they didn’t have “conventional” surnames. Their name was a composition of a given name plus that of their forefathers’, often appended with “Abu” (meaning father in Arabic), and sometimes the addition of a clan name. In my ancestral home of Egypt, the government often standardized everyone about 100-150 years ago with whatever names they were carrying at the time.

So you could be completely unrelated to someone and have a partially matching last name.

Combine that with America’s gleefully racist views of Arabs - particularly after 9/11 - and you have a recipe for disaster with no-fly lists.

This.

There is nothing scientific about anti-money laundering. It is one of the ways modern nations hang themselves with self-inflictes inefficiencies for very little gains. Because it's run by police organisations, you cannot criticise it as you would be labelled as a friend of terrorists.

In Saudi Arabia atheists are terrorists. And they also have the death penalty for terrorism.

I suppose on the plus side at least they actually sentence them, some countries just lock them up in extra judicial camps or orders a drone strike and never says a word.

It's so horrible. They probably think that they're helping atheists by sending them to the afterlife early. But what if the atheist is right and when you die, your last moment alive becomes frozen in your consciousness forever.

>> what if the atheist is right and when you die, your last moment alive becomes frozen in your consciousness forever.

I’m sorry what? Is this the predominant/common belief among other atheists? Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken with is more likely to think you just turn off, everything goes black, back to the void of unlife.

Yeah, they just made up. :/

I expect it to be unimaginable, literally, because without a running brain I can't imagine. How do you even reason or predict beyond that.

I’m not sure what others believe. But I bet that right before you die, it feels like you are running towards a light at the end of a tunnel. But for each step you take, you shrink by half. Making a moment feel like an eternity.

I checked: when you die, you rot. Atheist or not.

Where does the speed go when the car stops?

It's horrible either way but I think void is much better in this case.

This is misinformation. Saudi Arabia is not well regarded when it comes to religious freedom, and it has a law against apostasy (when a Muslim renounces their beliefs), which is a capital offense, but they don't classify atheists as terrorists.

> terrorism through public demonstrations of driving while female

Do you think Saudi Arabia is the Taliban or what? Even when it was banned, it wasn't the big of an offense.

And yes its no longer banned, and there are a lot of women drivers now.

Maybe trucking while unvaccinated is a better example?

> Do you think Saudi Arabia is the Taliban or what?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Saudi_Ar...

"In September 2011, a Sudanese migrant worker was beheaded for sorcery"

Was this a rhetorical question?

They executed shia cleric for being... shia cleric. If it would help them catch them they would put him on such a list to get similar persons deported from host countries.

I wish we lived in a world where our governments had integrity, prioritized the interests of the masses, and could be trusted to use powers like this in pursuit of those interests. Sadly we don’t.

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