I gave an example where something like that definitely happened. It's just an example. It might have nothing to do with Stenberg's case, but here's the thing:

I gave an example where something like that definitely happened. It's just an example. It might have nothing to do with Stenberg's case, but here's the thing: simplistic filters are a thing, and they are not useless, so I think we should suspect that they are in use. I gave my bank an earful about how silly it was of them to use a search for "crypto" to find money services businesses, and if it was someone at my bank who came up with that, then "silly" is quite right. But what if it was someone at Treasury who told my (and other) bank to do this? Then it's not so silly. Suppose this dragnet netted 1,000 non-MSBs and three MSBs two of which were in violation of Treasury regulations... Then from the perspective of Treasury a simple request to the banks netted two violators at almost zero cost to Treasury! What would be silly for my bank to do would be brilliant for Treasury to ask them to do. For me both are equally annoying, but I can't deny that a very simplistic filter can be brilliant for a bureaucrat to apply, not if I look at it from their perspective. Now, the Administration has been on about extreme vetting for visas. We can assume it's not just for Iraq and friends, but across the board. What does "extreme vetting" mean? Well, asking an applicant for 15 years' worth of travel and other information sure is extreme, will discourage the applicant, and if they continue they will likely make mistakes (they may not even have old passports whose entry/exit stamps to look at to make a list of all foreign travel!). The key for State bureaucrats is to have filters tuned such that they {plausibly claim to be doing extreme vetting, or actually be doing extreme vetting} but also such that the impact on legitimate business is not so bad as to cause members of Congress to be ringing State's phones off their hooks! How many non-black-hat "hackers" are being caught in a silly dragnet cast by a bureaucrat who has no idea what they are doing? It depends on the specifics of the dragnet, but I bet you the bureaucrat has the tools to tune it so that it catches hundreds not thousands, or whatever. And that brings me to an obvious piece of advice: Mozilla should talk to their Representative and Senators and put some pressure on State in order to resolve this issue. After all, while Stenberg has personal interests in visiting the U.S., Mozilla has a business interest in Stenberg visiting the U.S., and business almost certainly trumps the personal as far as State goes.