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.
There's an interesting downside to naming your child something very unique- you become significantly more Google-able than "Tom Jones". Potential employers, landlords, spouses, and other people will have a very easy time seeing all of your failures and folly.
THIS. I have a unique last name - there is absolutely no ambiguity whenever anything shows up.
Whenever a website (or anything offline that might put rankings or whatever online) wants me to use my real name, I usually default to "Alex", "Alex M/MJ" or "Alex (gibberish)" depending on their guidelines. What they view as a policy that "encourages openness", I view as something that will guide first impressions when people google me unto eternity.
Even if it's not controversial, it's the first thing a potential client or employer sees when they type things into google, and I don't want to be reckless with that. I don't want to have to view every minor action that I make on a website as something that's potentially going to be on the front page of google's results for my name.
When I was in HS, my friends had a poker league, and we all had nicknames and personas - someone put up a page with hilarious (but decidedly unprofessional) caricatures and quotes and it was the first thing that showed up under my name. I noticed it and asked my friend to change it, which he though was hilarious but understood and did.
Same for Meetup. A long time ago I went to some meetups that could potentially be alienating to some folks (agnostics and whatever, way back in the day when I felt it was worth arguing about) and BOOM, google front page for my name. If I had a client who was somewhat religious, I don't care at all but I don't want that to show up and all of a sudden I'm accidentally alienating people. For showing up to something.
Whenever I run a 5k or do anything remotely prestigious I always use my full name so that the front page of google just gets filled with that kind of thing in case anything else that's potentially a liability pops up and I don't notice it. It's annoying.
I am absolutely delighted that my name is sufficiently unique (and my online presence sufficiently diverse) that the entire first page of Google results that shows up is me.
>I don't want to have to view every minor action that I make on a website as something that's potentially going to be on the front page of google's results for my name.
It's true that I try to make every post to the Internet be something that I wouldn't worry about showing up in such a search.
But as a result, when people find me, they do have a lot of real data about me -- and I get job offers and consulting offers all the time.
I do not think it's a bad thing to be able to be Googled; what's a bad thing is to let yourself be a jerk online -- and it's important to Google yourself from time to time to see if something like your friend's page is showing up.
The Meetup point is a good one, though. It would be nice to be able to (optionally) conceal your presence in a Meetup. Be it related to atheism or religion or sexual orientation or recovering alcoholism or even stamp collecting or trainspotting, there are a lot of groups that one might want to join that they wouldn't necessarily want to shout about to everyone. And that's not the fault of having a unique name -- anyone in any Meetup group that I'm in will certainly be able to "out" me as a member of any other Meetup group that I'm a member of, even if I'm named John Smith. And it's entirely likely that I'll share professional Meetup groups with potential employers.
As a counterpoint, I run web forums and at times have encountered trolls. When they've been banned (at the behest of the vast majority of the community) some of them have made me their target.
Aside from death threats (which I dismiss as joking), I've been signed up to hundreds of porn and adult mailing lists and sites, I've had reports of my photo and vague details being used on lots of "m4m" casual sex adverts, and I've had the "here's a streetview of where you live, we know where you live" type intimidation.
I'm really glad that the efforts of a few trolls doesn't really show on Google because my name is fairly common and there are some people who share the name who have achieved some fame or popularity. The result of the top-ranking stuff means the work of the trolls is nowhere to be seen.
If I had a unique name I've no doubt that it would have been trashed thanks to other people.
My point is simply: You may think you are in control of your online identity, but you are not.
Sorry you've been harassed like that. I agree that I would have a hard time dealing with that kind of situation.
I think having a strong web presence myself means that the work of any would-be trolls would struggle to make it onto the front page -- though I do ask that would-be trolls reading this not try to prove me wrong, thank you. :)
That's fine if you have insanely high PageRank. If some jackass with considerably higher PR decides to troll you, there's pretty much nothing you can do about it.
> I do not think it's a bad thing to be able to be Googled; what's a bad thing is to let yourself be a jerk online
Ehhh, it's not always that.
For awhile I was big into writing speculative/science fiction on a popular writing site. Years later after reading some of my submissions I have to say I'm extremely happy that they were done under a pseudonym :)
My favorite local video store (quaint, I know) organizes films by director and it's always encouraging to walk through there and see that even great directors sometimes make terrible movies.
I've read it. I have a copy of the PDF on my hard drive.
I called out Meetup's policy explicitly as a privacy problem, and I'm not arguing for reduced overall privacy over any aspect of someone's life they decide they'd prefer to keep private.
What exactly did you mean for me to learn from reading that paper?
From what I read of that document, he says "People have these arguments against privacy, but they're wrong." But I get to the end of the article, and it never seemed to me that he really fleshed out the "why."
I still think it's right to support privacy. But I'm not arguing against a right to privacy. I'm arguing that if I want to put my name out there, I should be able to.
I'm confused why my right to want to promote myself on the Internet is being questioned (and downvoted above!!) on HN of all places.
If you have nothing to hide it's fine. Well it's not. Stalkers and bullies love to find informations wether it's shameful or not. It makes their task easier.
This argument proves too much. Living your life normally, in general, helps stalkers and bullies. The only thing that doesn't "help" them (in one way) is making your own life more difficult for their sake... which "helps" them more directly, by making them feel acknowledged and dominant.
People should not have to compensate for the actions of broken people. Celebrities know how to be functional in this situation: share everything, and get restraining orders.
> "People should not have to compensate for the actions of broken people."
Right... I shouldn't have to lock my door, I shouldn't have to avoid dark alleys, I should be able to carry as much cash as I please... but I live in an unjust reality in which it is frequently prudent to take basic precautions.
I looked into getting a restraining order once, after a petty argument online (before I learned better and began using pseudonyms while discussing anything of interest) turned extremely sour. Turns out that since I was never in a sexual relationship with the other person, the state I was currently living in limited my options to "suck it up", or "get a CCW". The general concept of a restraining order is not universally recognized.
(Furthermore, restraining orders are not preventive, they only provide a form of retaliation after the fact. They won't stop somebody from hiding in a bush outside your front door, they'll just allow you to have the police slap them with a restraining order violation after you discover them in your bush. Appealing to restraining orders to protect you is like appealing to burglary laws to protect you. You still need to lock up your home...)
I know people in reality sometimes have to of course, which is why I am not for real name policies. But I do want the problems to be fixed properly if possible.
Out of curiosity, what sites would you say have been constructive?
My intuition is that StackExchange would probably be good if you're knowledgeable in esoteric/lucrative fields, whereas most people probably don't use their real name on reddit (depending on the subreddit, perhaps), but I'm interested to hear your experience.
I'm on StackExchange, yes. I've also posted to forums that cover my field expertise where I (at least used to) answer a lot a questions.
Honestly I don't know how people find me. I just state my opinions often on the topics I care about. And at least some of the time people respond favorably to those opinions.
I don't mind a bit of both worlds on this.. my real name is pretty common, not so common that you could never find me with my real name, but on the flip side, my alias is pretty specific to me... if you search for my first or last name, with my online handle, you're pretty likely to find me.
Most of the first page of google results for my alias are me... combined with my name, you get even more. I think adopting an online alias is kind of important, but then again, I started off in the BBS days with dialup boards that were pretty much all local to you.
I have a friend who has the dubious honor of sharing a name with a convicted murderer who was executed in Texas a few years ago.
I asked him about how he thinks that has effected him. His take is that although it might turn off some brain-dead HR people, since there is no actual ambiguity (he surely is not an executed person) it hasn't negatively impacted him too much but it does push all the relevant links off the first few google results pages unless he actively does SEO stuff to correct it. He asserts that it gives him a good deal of control over what google shows for his name.
I've taken a similar approach to online pseudonyms. Any work that I don't intend to be attached to my 'meatspace' identity is done under names that will return irrelevant results when googled, making it difficult to find my other accounts that may have the same pseudonym on other sites.
Trying to fly under the radar, as you do, may be some solution, but it makes the mistakes like this one stick out even more boldly.
I've found that over the years, there's enough of a heap on the web that matches my name, that garbage like you mention is overwhelmed by the more meaningful stuff. A search for me typically turns up my LinkedIn profile, the product page on Amazon for a book I co-authored, some CodeProject articles, and stuff like that.
Just having a life's worth of stuff out there lets a smart search engine ignore much of the stuff that I'd want them to ignore.
Hey, actually if you ready to spend some time, there is a way to solve your problem. The algorithm is simple -- add noise. Create multiple virtual identities with first/last name. Then instantiate these identities in social networks, forums, mailing lists, etc. Link corresponding accounts together to raise their search ranking. Bam! You're not longer visible on first page of google search results.
While security through obscurity wont work against a sophisticated opponent, its enough to prevent casual snooping.
I have a very uncommon last name and relatively uncommon first name. Still, there are three people on the internet with my name. We're all within two years of each other in age. One even lives in the state I grew up in. Put us all together and there's not a demographic we can't offend in some way.
And having an unusual name can also make you run afoul of Google+'s "no unusual name" policy, where accounts get blocked just because someone at Google thinks it can't be a real name (they're often wrong).
Facebook also has a "no unusual name" policy, but it's very randomly enforced.
My friend's first name is "Spider." It is not her birth name, but she's used it professionally and personally her entire adult life.
When she signed up for Facebook they told her she couldn't be "Spider" because somebody (Sony probably) decided that wasn't a "real" name (Spider Robinson and Spider Sabich notwithstanding.) If she wanted to use "Spider" Facebook needed a legal ID with that name on it (which she does not have.)
So she registered under "Spidie" instead with no further problems.
I would recommend that parents encourage their children to use a variety of usernames on the major social platforms, none of which are related to their legal name.
I'm in the process of transitioning to a single username everywhere based on the domain ngp.io, which itself is essentially "[my intials] I/O". I like the elegance and conciseness of it. But I'm extremely glad that I didn't do something like this earlier. My childhood online (as well as my "online childhood", if you catch my meaning) remain obscure to all but those with the necessary time, resources and motivation.
That's surprisingly powerful when you're surrounded by swarms of people whose entire histories can be looked up in a matter of minutes.
It can also be damning; I'm reminded of the line in Mad Men referring to Don Draper, "He has no people! You can't trust a person like that." Being the mysterious man from out of town might be alluring from a sexual stance, but business-wise it's still difficult to advance without strong geographically-rooted social networks, and the first step to creating those nowadays is often glancing at someone's Facebook or Twitter and exclaiming "hey, I know that person too!" Personhood is partially defined by your connection to other people, so having a visible interpersonal history is, in a sense, required for passing the Turing tests you're subjected to by those around you. Gaps in your history, on purpose or by accident, can result in being treated like a subhuman.
No, but that doesn't imply that it shouldn't hold true for the entirety of the child's legal childhood.
There's always been a feature of childhood that I feel is paramount: the freedom to alter one's identity. The child is still in beta; they're a person that's not officially released to the public.
Forcing them, from the start, to stick a single identity can be problematic psychologically and socially.
Encouraging situational pseudonymity is not equal to the revocation of one's legal identity, from now until death.
I can say with certainty that, had I not had the benefits of pseudonymity offered by the internet of the 90s and 00s, I would be a fundamentally broken person.
The assumption that this "freedom" remain available in the future is what I challenged, not a social obligation not to avail yourself of it. It may become technically or legally impossible to operate under a pseudonym or to change your legal name in the future. If you give your child a unique name, and the ability to operate under a different name is not available, then you've guaranteed their activity (childhood or otherwise) is easily cataloged and searchable.
> And if it becomes technically or illegally impossible to operate under a pseudonym or to change your legal name in 10 years? That this won't happen is the assumption I challenged, not some social obligation not to choose to use a pseudonym.
Then we should work to make that future unlikely. Even if things come to be as you describe, we should build in strict social/technical safeguards of (at the very least) pseudonymity until we much better understand the development the human mind.
[edit in response to your edited post] It seems we're pretty much in agreement, just coming at the issue from different points of devil's advocacy.
One of the social safeguards for preserving pseudonymity (your advice) in the face of a future you cannot control is giving your child a common name, so that their activity cannot easily be discerned from that of many others. As hard as you work, you may not be able to prevent future technical and legal changes from occurring.
> One of the social safeguards for preserving pseudonymity (your advice) in the face of a future you cannot control is giving your child a common name, so that their activity cannot easily be discerned from that of many others.
I agree. I'm very grateful to have a common name. Nate Perkins is about as generic as it gets. Global searches for my name come up with a variety of people completely unrelated to me.
Still, there are potential downsides. For instance, searching for "[my name] [my city]" brings up a mugshot of someone who isn't me. And of course, Stephen Law of the original post has a much more frustrating issue.
None of us are really in a position to say with certainty "it's better to have a common name than an uncommon one" or vice versa.
I would argue that pseudonymity is necessary to overcome negative situations arising from having a common name or having an uncommon name. But this argument is strictly from my own experience and should be taken as such.
Like most things, it comes down to the importance of teaching kids to think critically about how their choices will affect themselves and their environment rather than accepting truisms not backed by relevant statistics.
I think your sentiments and insights here are echoed in a longstanding practice in American law where minors are referred to by their initials only in case names and opinions (for example, New Jersey v. T.L.O.).
I always considered this to be an upside. Being googlable always felt to me like a synonym to existing; it's a way for potential employers to see that I know stuff because of all the texts and hobby projects; for potential future spouses/other people to see that I'm an interesting person who does something creative, etc.
Funny how I didn't notice when being easily googlable started to be considered a bad thing.
I'm not sure. I've been lucky enough to not have to worry about it, but I've definitely seen it (mostly of the "stalker" variety) and can easily understand why someone would want to remain on the "down low".
I don't mean to pile on you personally, but this issue always pushes my buttons. It seems like whenever it comes up, there's always those who are absolutely incredulous that anyone wouldn't want to be all over the internet. Worse, I've even seen the reaction where some people think that it means the person must be untrustworthy, as if they are the ones who did something wrong.
If someone wants to be all over the front page of Google when someone searches their name, I think that's fine if that's what they want. Just don't assume that everyone wants (or should want) the same thing.
I enjoy the fact that my name, Josh Wright, is reasonably common. Even if you try to make it a bit more specific by adding the city I live in, Syracuse, I'm buried under results for a guy who used to play basketball for Syracuse University.
If they find you on linked in, they can google reverse image search your profile picture and probably come up with quite a bit. Now imagine google introducing facial recognition search.
Honestly, I think the opposite approach makes more sense.
Get to the level of names so common sanctions are impossible. If a name is now something many entity a long distance away can just sanction, best to be John Smith or David Jones since he would be at least protected by numbers
Famous last words, I know but it would be hard to sanction all the world's David Jones'
Stephen Law is a fairly common, generic name though, returning plenty of names in a Facebook search, including one I went to school with. Indeed the sanctioned "Stephen Law", whose Western moniker is also often spelled "Steven" perhaps chose it precisely because it sounds so generic and difficult to infer nationality from.
I agree that the names are actually rooted in ethno-linguistic groups rather than citizenship, but it's actually very easy to infer that someone calling himself Htun Myint Naing probably holds a Myanmar passport, and
citizenship is the most pertinent fact when you're doing business internationally, especially when you're from a pariah state.
Sure, you'd be hard pressed to guess the nationality of most people with standard Spanish and English names, and people can make a lot of wrong inferences about nationality because of migration, intermarriage (recently I've lived with Britons with very obviously Polish, Italian and Spanish-diaspora names respectively) or ethnic groups overlapping borders.
You'd also be wrong in thinking that Lo Ping Zhong was likely to be a citizen of China rather than Myanmar, but you'd still be more inclined to background check his company more than Stephen Law's.
But also keep in mind that the name in question is a known alias of someone they are watching for. That means that any expectation you have of an ethnolinguistic connection to the individual goes out the window as well, since the individual has total control over it.
Honestly, the government doesn't care how common your name is. It will ban it, sanction it, etc. We can see this in the no-fly list. They really don't care if all Smith's are banned. Even better for them.
> ensure that before they name their babies, those [names] are not on some list
You could go one step further: Give your child a name such that, if someone tries to put the name on a list in the future, they'll lose their entire database instead [1].
c'mon; give government technologists the benefit of the doubt. they've been around long enough to know what's up. it's gotta be punch-cards for the hollerith tabulator.
It's better to name your child something so common that any listing of their name would be insanely disruptive. This protects against more cases, and also doesn't degrade their privacy.
That doesn't seem like an optimal solution. Ideally these lists should match against more data than just a name. Financial institutions seem to work this way. I share my name with a convicted Ponzi schemer currently sitting in federal prison, but I've never had a problem getting credit or opening bank accounts.
Financial institutions match it against more data if that data is provided - if money is wired to "Stephen Law ID#1234" (simplifying), then it can be positively verified as being not the 'forbidden' Stephen Law, but if some item or money is sent to simply "Stephen Law" w/o any extra information, then it would be restricted, since the system is deny-by-default, of course.
My name is essentially unique. Neither first nor last are that rare but they're not that common either and of somewhat different ethnicities. (Someone else in the last century seemed to have the same name but they had no Internet footprint as far as I could tell.)
Personally, I don't mind that if you pull up my name, you find me though YMMV.
The really bad thing IMO would be having a fairly uncommon name and sharing it with someone notorious. You don't even need to get into Do-Not-Fly lists and the like. I had a classmate a long while back (pre-web) who lived in New York and he apparently shared his name with someone who got into a very public spat with George Steinbrenner. My classmate got all sorts of phone calls and even death threats.
it is time to consider naming your babies with names that are extremely unlikely to be common
Apart from being overly paranoid, this is not really workable at a demographic level. Far easier, demographically, to just change your name in the rare event where this happens.
My government allows me to have multiple passports, because of various problems with visa. I think I should also ask for multiple identities because of all this spying and anti-terrorists.
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.
I have a friend with an extremely common Irish name. There's a suspected terrorist with the same name, and he's on the no-fly list. My friend has a redress number now, but at the time he had to check-in at the counter and show ID every time he flew. Fortunately, different birthday. Now imagine being the unlucky person with the same name and birthday as the suspected terrorist.
The financial list discussed in this posting sounds much, much more onerous.
Had this exact experience for.. well, 2006-2010 or so, I too have a very common name.
Couldnt check in online.
Unable to use Kiosk to check in
Had to show ID at counter.
Had SSSS on every boarding pass - with random extra inspection for every tlight
Then one day, it stopped, now knock on wood I can check in online or at kiosk.
This is really exceptionally ridiculous. I hope that this incident has ignited a healthy hatred of these policies enough to inspire you to attempt to change things by suing or political donations.
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?
The President doesn't have to use normal airplanes, and almost undoubtedly does not get his goods from Amazon mailed to "Barack Obama, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue".
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.)
The saddest part of the obsession with names in the US is that the systems in place are woefully inadequate when it comes to handling names that fall outside the standard US pattern of Firstname Initial Lastname, all in ASCII.
My name contains the character ö, so every time I'm asked to give out my true name here in the US, I have to remember to not do that, and instead state my name as it's transcribed to ASCII in my passport. One time I booked plane tickets and wrote my last name as SCHRODER on the ticket, instead of SCHROEDER as it says on the passport. This was a HUGE PROBLEM BECAUSE THE NAMES DON'T MATCH.
Yes, but, look, they're both wrong, and they're close enough that surely you can see they're the same?
My husband has three first names, the middle of which is his given name, and one last name. For some reason when he applied for his EAD, the last letter of his third first name fell off (I'm guessing character limit in some field in some system), so when we was getting his SSN, there was a huge problem, because again, THE NAMES DIDN'T MATCH!!! So it was just gonna take weeks longer to receive it, presumably because some other human has to look at it and ok it. There was also not enough space in the first name field, so he got some of his first names moved to the middle name field instead. I'm sure this will cause all sorts of fun and hijinks in the future if someone tries to match the name kind by kind, instead of just the full name.
I remember being a fresh TA and doing my first roll-check in a class. There was a strange name I didn't recognise on the list: CQUELINE. After struggling to pronounce the name (some kind of french-influenced african??), it turned out that the admin temp preparing the list had accidentally chopped off the first two letters.
Somewhat embarrassing, because I knew of Jacquie previously, though I'd never seen her name written.
The airlines are pretty smart about this problem to ensure their passengers don’t get caught up in this - I’ve had them change the name on my booking before at check in because the travel agent didn’t do it right.
Austria now, by default, gives people the option to put a notice in the page facing the name page that says in multiple languages that Schroeder is equivalent to Schröder. Not sure if the Germans do it too... can’t hurt to ask.
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.
If you or anyone else wants to change names, make sure your new one isn't on the OFAC SDN list, and don't pick a name from an ethnicity (non-oriental asian, and perhaps african) that's more likely to end up on the list in the future. That's one list you can check.
I have a friend named John Edward Smith III. There were 2 other people with the exact same name in the employee+student database of our university (50,000 names.)
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.
And yet there have been many banks willing to money launder and deal in illegal activities if the price (profit) is high enough. I guess ordinary customers just aren't rich enough.
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.
It's worth pointing out the flip side of that cost-benefit equation, which is that the constant irritation of Western restrictions on their freedom to spend their ill-gotten gains is believed to be one of the main factors behind the Burmese military junta's relatively recent acceptance of reform.
Arguably Myanmar's 60 million mostly impoverished people deserve as much consideration as a pretty large number of innocent people with the name Stephen/Steven Law.
The entire nature of the social contract is based on the idea that punishing you to make the world better is OK. You are punished in the form of taxes so that the government can provide social security and foreign aid and military intervention (independent of whether you individually support those actions). You are inconvenienced in the form of DUI checkpoints to punish drunk drivers.
You have a couple of choices:
1: Decide that the net cost to living in civilization is worse than the benefit, and go and live with some nomadic hunter-gatherers somewhere.
2: Vote to change policies you disagree with, and live with the ones that you are in the minority on.
>the constant irritation of Western restrictions on their freedom to spend their ill-gotten gains is believed to be one of the main factors behind the Burmese military junta's relatively recent acceptance of reform.
Believed by whom? That's just a make-believe success story of those imposing these policies. Certainly haven't affected any other junta with or without drugs.
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).
People occasionally mail me asking what sort of Japanese rock music they should buy, because my domain is jrock.us. I just search on Amazon and recommend whatever seems popular. (Does Houkago Tea Time count as J-Rock? Probably not. I guess I should change my name to animesong.)
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.
Senator Kennedy's woes have not resulted in the no-fly list being thrashed. Not sure we'd get a better outcome for financial transaction if something similar were to occur.
Just with a brief scan it looks like over 90% of the names are arab, and it seems to cover all of the common names. Does this mean a large percentage of arab people cannot send money/packages involving the US?
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.
I think his definition of recent is inclusive of 2001. He seems to be referring to the time period before powerful commodity computer systems were easily available and deeply integrated into every aspect of life, probably like '85 on back. For some edgy cases this could protrude into the mid-90s, but I don't see it going any later.
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.
If the postal carrier holds the parcel for any reason, that can backfire, as they usually need ID for a pickup. A not insurmountable problem, but annoying. I once shipped a parcel to a forum acquiantaince under his handle, and he had a mild problem proving to the post office that he was the guy at that address.
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?
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 ...
Well, you can't legally change your name without that change being recorded and published to every govt institution that wants it, and having non-expired criminal convictions generally makes people illegible from name changes as well.
I've not had good success with this. Too often the delivery service really really wants to use the name for actual delivery. However it would be entirely possible to start receiving mail for your fictional and non-blacklisted friend to train up the various delivery people. In the article there was also an issue with bank transactions and using an arbitrary name for those is generally frowned upon.
I think that when you are a terrorist you also can have actual friends that can receive a package for you. Blacklisting name and surname gives no security apart from places where you personally must produce your own ID. It has merit when checking passport on the border but none when you decide whether to ship a package to another country or even to receive money.
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.
Yes. Even if he was, how is making bank payments less convenient helping? If he's the nefarious Stephen Law, discovered living in the UK, wouldn't it be better to go around to his address and arrest him?
Stephen M. Law (or whatever his middle initial is).
It's cack-handed bureaucracy of course but this is like saying that companies occasionally sending bills to dead people means that computers are a bad idea. This is the price you pay for automation.
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.
I'm not defending it but I don't think they are using then as primary keys. Imagine if they did not look at the names or have lists at all, and something happens involving someone with a name of a known terrorist. People would cry "why doesn't the government have a list, are they too stupid to know how to search databases?"
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.