How the US Treasury imposes sanctions on me and every other "Stephen Law"

Stuff like this makes one wonder that even though unfortunate, it is time to consider naming your babies with names that are extremely unlikely to be common. heck, may be even add a salt to it while we are at it. Ok the salt part is a joke but seriously, one has to feel for those who share their names with people on these "special" lists by Governments.

May be a start-up idea for prospective parents to run the names and ensure that before they name their babies, those are not on some list. But then what if someone gets on the list later on ? So it seems like a very unique name is really the option.

Also, do these special lists really flag people just by their names ? really ? I mean how many John Smiths can there be in this world and god forbid if one of them decides to do something "special". What about other attributes ? Is it really hard to have the unique key as (first name,last name, gender, age, place of birth, citizenship, blah blah) instead of just (first name, last name) and boom, you are flagged.

EDIT: Based on some comments, it might be a good idea to have a legal name that is very unique and a social name/nickname that is the usual John Smithy type. This way, when you deal with legal/customs whatever, use the crazily unique legal name while on the internet, use a nickname.

Also, while we are discussing names, I seriously suggest you to register domain names (and gmail/fb whatever) for yourself and kids if not already. Again unfortunate, but reality of this era. I have already booked domains names for my 1 year old and another one who is coming soon.

We were flying with my son (then six months old) recently, and he has a reasonably uncommon name. He was flagged by the TSA as being on the no-fly list, which caused us to have to submit to onerous additional security procedures and miss our flight. So, ya know, way to go, TSA.

Having had to learn this in our "ethics training" requirements at work (what a joke), I was astonished that they actually intend it to be illegal to have any commerce whatsoever with anyone on with a name on this list. I also realized that no US company actually filters their sales and order forms against this data (to my knowledge) and thus everyone is essentially guilt of trafficking illegally with anyone who has a name on this list. Order a trinket from Amazon and use a name on the list? Amazon is breaking Federal law. Rent a hotel room to a name matching one of this list, your OTA is violating a Federal Law. Other than customs and maybe banking I doubt anyone is even aware of this much less actually spends any time filtering their customers this way. Despite the addresses being on the list, like the no-fly lists, the name is the only requirement to match.

I've always wondered if the President matched a name on the list, would they hassle him/her as well?

It keeps astonishing me that the U.S. government treats firstname/lastname as a unique key.

I don't see a workaround for shipping, but for wire transfers there's bitcoin, if there's an exchange somewhere that won't have to deal with this when converting money back to your national currency. (Perhaps someday, bitcoins will be spendable enough so that step won't be necessary.)

I was thinking about this the other day. My last name is extremely rare; less than 20 people in the world have it.

As such, I am completely unable to maintain any level of anonymity in the world today. It's trivial to find anything I've been up to by using Google or Bing. You can even see my entire family and what they've been up to and there's no doubt they're my family because my last name is so rare.

I seriously considered changing my last name to Smith. I think it's better to have nefarious people drown in a sea of false positives than it is to give them pinpoint accuracy directly to me (as I have today) or few enough false positives (as Stephen Law has) that they catch a lot of innocent people in their wide net.

I actually know some people with the Smith last name. Every time they buy a house, the title insurance company provides them a list of deadbeats with their exact same name and they simply sign a form saying, "Not me" and their transaction continues.

Imagine if they wanted to put John Smith or Joseph Brown on the OFAC list. They'd never be able to.

Previous sanctions data analyst here. At my previous bank I worked for they follow a process like this:

1. Screen by name and date of birth (sometimes only year of birth only) for all lists (EU, US, Australia, etc); with some tolerance 2. Manually match against address, sex, etc

Now for some of these lists, depending on the vendor which is used, they may also have information on where the person(s) were last seen (perhaps they're from China and recently visited UK based on public information); not only their country of residence. So this means, if you happen to have a birthday sufficiently close to someone on the list (+-2 yrs) and they happen to be last seen in the country you reside in, then they would have to do the whole manual checking.

Now this seems like a lot of work, but when you consider things like reputation risk of getting caught and the possible fines, banks would rather screw over their own customer (or outright refuse to do certain transactions to certain countries) than doing what is best for their customers.

For the other attributes which are available like sex, it is sometimes used, but often for manual checking. Data is often too messy to have a viable real-time solution for screening. It is often cheaper to get someone from India to do it for you, rather than re-haul a whole database to have it done "properly". This is the unfortunate reality.

It seems that the governments try to keep coming up with new ways to punish lawbreakers like drug traffickers without regard to the effect it has on the larger society and the economy.

If you're a criminal or marked as such, you couldn't 1) keep your ill gotten money, 2) make money from selling your stories about your criminal exploit, 3) can't make legit money once you get out of jail since nobody hire felons, 4) branded even more if you're a sex offender, 5) can't get on planes due to no-fly list, 6) can't get sent money if you're on the treasury list.

All of these are of course, "well intentioned", but it does collateral damages. If your name is even "Stephen Law", you can't get wired money. AML laws forced banks to spend a shitload of money spying on people's finance that would otherwise be spent on more productive activities. Oh, it disallow banks and other money related services from forming, creating olipologies and monopolies. People who aren't terrorists are now on the no-fly list for no reason or because of procedural mistakes. Now they drive and die in motor vechicle accidents. Felons cannot contribute to society or get because nobody wants to hire them, so they became the underclass in societies and some of them will turn back to criminal behaviors.

Obviously, there are measure worth implementing, but they must be judged not on just preventing crimes, but also the cost to societies. Heck, some of these measure aren't even effective, and wastes policing resource.

People basically can't just "Google" me. Why? My name is Zac Brown. That's already a pretty common name. But the musician pretty much shields me from everyone.

Interesting side note:

I occasionally get email that is directed at that Zac Brown. Including a guy asking if I would play a gig at their company retreat (I agreed to), a guy asking about boat decals (I didn't like them), and a guy just looking to catch up for old times sake (I informed him that I was the wrong guy but wished him the best).

Somebody who works for the guy even added me on LinkedIn (I accepted because why not).

This is unlikely to get resolved until one of these "terrorists" adopts the name of a Member of Congress as an alias. Until then, this ham-fisted policy is for your protection.

The full list is pretty incredible. http://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/t11sdn.pdf

I've had rebate cards blocked because my name "Omar Ali" matched the alias "Ali Omar" of someone who is in detention in the Philippines but still on this list http://www.un.org/sc/committees/1267/AQList.htm

Adding a letter to my last name was enough to not match anymore.

I don't think this represents a change in government mentality. Probably more a shift in technical capability. Before, requiring every bank and merchant to check every order against a list would have been onerous. Now, it's fairly easy.

I find it curious how so many specific powers that have been granted to government were allowed not because they were universally acceptable, but because they were impossible to enforce widely.

As automatic monitoring and enforcement get easier, I suspect we'll have a more robust debate on what types of laws are acceptable, because there will be so little room for leeway.

The workaround for shipping goods seems easy: put a different name on the shipment. As long as the address is correct, it should be fine. Will US customs check the names of everybody who is officially registered at that address in the UK? I suspect not.

And if it has to be a real name, just put the name of your spouse, friend or family member on it.

Of course all of that just illustrates how utterly ineffective such an OFAC blockade is.

It's so easy for this mistake to happen and inconvenience the wrong person. It seems all they check is your name. What happens if they change their name? Does the entire hassle go away?

It can go very far, sadly: I found the story of a guy killed because he was homonymous when I wrote http://ils.sont.la/post/is-your-name-web-ready some time ago.

Homonymity is never really an asset: you don't control it as you can control anonymity and pseudonymity.

Now imagine the increases in difficulty when we deal with non-Latin names, which often have 2 to 3 ways of being translated to Latin name schemes.

This is why any list does not work as its non-specific whereas if we get specific about metadata that is combined with the name than we have an effective block list instead of a government cluster fuck.

My dad, who travelled the world for his work, was denied entry to the USA in the 60's because he had the same surname, initials and DOB as a local member of the communist party.

The silly part here is that while it is a pain, it is certainly possible to change your name legally. And in so doing "vanish" from the list. Of course regular folks won't go through the trouble but terrorists will ...

Anyone else notice that "Peter Griffin" is on this list?

https://ofac.data-list-search.com/Entities/ByName/peter-grif...

This scattershot approach to inconveniencing suspected criminals seems similar to how the US conducts drone strikes: it doesn't matter how much collateral damage you cause, as long as you're targeting the right guy.

Imagine the hell they are going to go through if they ever try to visit the US.

Easy solution, setup company name, use company name for all package shipments, wire transfers, checks, etc. Should solve everything but the travel.

Am I the only one who thought, "Maybe he is the Burmese Stephen Law, and this is just a cover story?"

Why doesn't he just get stuff sent to Steve Law.

Problem solved.

"email letter to OFAC "

I really hope he at least sent a real letter.

Names should never be used as primary keys. I am amazed that our government does not understand this or simply doesn't care. I would even question whether we should be imposing these types of sanctions in the first place -- feels like punishment without trial.

What a stupid system. If customs is blocking packages, can't the real Stephen Law just have it mailed to Steven Law or Foo Bar or anything?

I think the word for this is "Kafkaesque".

In double entry this could be termed an error of commission, four entries are required for correction.

It's amazing with all the spying that the US Government can be so incredibly stupid.

Couln't he set up an alias of some kind to manage his earnings and international money related stuff ?

It seems common for criminals to get fake ID and associate it with their bank accounts, etc. So it might be an (illegal?) solution.

Treasury is Breaking the Law

The NoFly list for banks.

Thanks for the update