Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Boing Boing: Treasury Dept's 250-page list of bad names:

If you want to buy a car or a house and your name kind-of, sort-of matches a possible, suspected, conceivable alias of someone who might could be a terrorist, get ready for a fight.

The Office of Foreign Asset Control's list of "specially designated nationals" is a list of people who might be terrorists. Or might have the same names as terrorists. Or might sound like the same name as a terrorist. Or might sound like a name that a terrorist might make up, but hasn't.

The list is 250 pages long. If you do business with a person on the list, you can pay $10 million in fines and go to jail for 30 years. "Doing business" can be as simple as selling one of those people a sandwich. Not an anthrax sandwich -- like a roast beef on rye.

5:56 PM