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Comment by pibaker | Hacker News Reader

Objection to ID numbers as a concept aside, I don't think it actually solves the problem this author faced.

Fake identities are dime a dozen. It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves. How do you convince some company drone doing sanction compliance that you didn't actually work for Sanction Circumvention Ltd when your ID number matches the one on their company's payroll files?

Not to mention the sanction list is full of foreigners. The American authorities compiling the list aren't going to know what's the national ID of a random Russian or Iranian guy running an import business. So what is going to happen if your name matches someone who's on the list with a blank ID field? Probably the same thing that happened to the author, I guess.

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If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it. They could verify that it actually belongs to the person they want to sanction before putting it on the list. Failing that, the actual person can prove that they don’t belong on the list by verifying their identity.

Verifying identity is a much simpler problem than establishing identity.

> If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it

They didn't care to figure out if the Sean Byrne of County Sligo actually existed before putting the name on the list. I doubt they would bother verifying an ID number.

Plus, going back to my point about the list being full of foreigners, how do you verify the validity of a foreign ID number and address? Maybe Ireland is going to comply with a US request, but many other countries won't, and you are now back to square one.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. As you said, Ireland might comply, which would’ve solved this particular issue.

Yes it's true we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. But good also has to be good enough to solve the problem without creating more problems faster than it solves them.

It's fine to propose a solution but if people aren't convinced just throwing an aphorism grenade at them isn't productive.

I like to tack on "good enough" when throwing this particular aphorism grenade

The courts obviously never had an id document for the US to find. Is the US going to omit all partial identities to avoid false positives or is Ireland going to illegally investigate lists for the US from extra judicial processes that likely involve non-extraditable crimes? Will the US believe every country that says these investigations found no real citizen?

Not bending to the US might be less convenient at times but if you bend for them you will eventually be bending for China.

Testing a new Markov chain? What is this incoherent drivel?

From the article which clearly wasn’t read:

> In both cases the courts called for better matching. Compare the date of birth. Compare the middle name.

> There is no version of that available to me. The listing has no date of birth to compare. No middle name and no passport number, because the person doesn’t exist. A screening system that does its job perfectly will still flag me, forever, on the only two facts the record contains: a common Irish name and a country.

These systems operate by matching as much information as possible. If the information isn’t there but the rest matches (even if it’s just a name) it flags in the system.

> Failing that, the actual person can prove that they don’t belong on the list by verifying their identity.

Sounds like you should tell the author. They’ve been living with this problem for 6 years but I’m sure your zero experience with these systems or trying to deal with it will help him immensely.

> It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves.

The idea is you largely prevented the theft, and made it easier to prove, by linking to a physical verifiableb address.

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