4 ms·

Finance background here. All these PEP, sanction lists, ofac monitoring, financial sanction lists already exist and every company with a worthwile monetary tu

Finance background here. All these PEP, sanction lists, ofac monitoring, financial sanction lists already exist and every company with a worthwile monetary turnover ever facing an audit runs these background checks. The laws are there, they are called the aml directives, the lists are there. And most of the entries there are provided by eitjer uk or us entities, youll usually find foreign military personells data there, dob, rank, id number, name but not much else. It is bit of a joke as many muslim people have similar names and joe shmoes get flagged for nothing very often. Meanwhile, the people on these lists are very high up within their own government hierarchy, they probably have 5 differe t passports. Btw, these lists are csv files often...some sophistication. Yea, monitor peps, fugitives and terrorists, but find a way without combing through the whole worlds innocent citizens.

SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
> Btw, these lists are csv files often...some sophistication. And surely this critically sensitive data is not left on a shared location with loose permissions, or sent around as an email attachment, right? ...right? I'm worried about the ability of this data to enable authoritarianism and I'm also worried about it being handled by those with the competence of the average government official. "Never blame on malice what you can blame on stupidity", however the problem is government has both of those in spades.
- u10 4y ago
  Critical sensitive data? You can access the lists directly in several different formats, all publically available... Wouldn't be much of a sanctions list if you couldn't https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-sanctions-consolidated-list-of-targets/consolidated-list-of-targets https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-sanctio...
  - xordon 4y ago
    Sanctioned persons are not the same as politically exposed persons. You are still allowed to do business with PEPs.
satellite2 4y ago
Those are blacklists, i.e. known criminals. The US is asking for whitelists, i.e. everyone and without motives
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  No it isn’t. There is no bulk access, just responses to queries of biometric data for persons of interest.
  - chaps 4y ago
    That "just" is holding an enormous weight there, friend. Have you seen the query responses themselves to know whether they're not not getting back bulk info? And have you seen the giant private-public systems they'll want to funnel this info into? Just from my own research on surveillance, I got back a bunch of records in a FOIA lawsuit that included the the query results of a bunch of license plate scans. Large XML blobs. For whatever reason, they didn't redact a few thousand pages of those query results. A lot more info was in those query responses than you'd imagine. For example, SSNs of people whose license plates matched the first three digits of a "person of interest"'s car. Mind you, this was after them arguing for months, with affidavits, that they don't have audit logs. So, yeah.
  - still_grokking 4y ago
    Sure, sure, and the query looks like: SELECT * FROM Person JOIN Biometric_Datum ON Person.id = Biometric_Datum.person_id; See, no bulk access. Just a response to a query, only once an day, or so.
devoutsalsa 4y ago
On the related topic of Arabic names, I currently visiting Tunisia. The other day I asked one of my friends how to spell her name using Latin letters, and she said “you can use one C, two Cs, one K, it doesn’t matter.” Now I’m wondering how many people have problems because their names have been casually spelled a few different ways and linked to someone else’s name in accident.
- ghostDancer 4y ago
  It has already happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  The US doesn't care: if your name seems to match a terrorist's, you are that terrorist.
- master_crab 4y ago
  This is a problem with all transliterated languages. It’s worse for Arabs because until modern times they didn’t have “conventional” surnames. Their name was a composition of a given name plus that of their forefathers’, often appended with “Abu” (meaning father in Arabic), and sometimes the addition of a clan name. In my ancestral home of Egypt, the government often standardized everyone about 100-150 years ago with whatever names they were carrying at the time. So you could be completely unrelated to someone and have a partially matching last name. Combine that with America’s gleefully racist views of Arabs - particularly after 9/11 - and you have a recipe for disaster with no-fly lists.
miohtama 4y ago
This. There is nothing scientific about anti-money laundering. It is one of the ways modern nations hang themselves with self-inflictes inefficiencies for very little gains. Because it's run by police organisations, you cannot criticise it as you would be labelled as a friend of terrorists.

SturgeonsLaw 4y ago

> Btw, these lists are csv files often...some sophistication. And surely this critically sensitive data is not left on a shared location with loose permissions, or sent around as an email attachment, right? ...right? I'm worried about the ability of this data to enable authoritarianism and I'm also worried about it being handled by those with the competence of the average government official. "Never blame on malice what you can blame on stupidity", however the problem is government has both of those in spades.

u10 4y ago
Critical sensitive data? You can access the lists directly in several different formats, all publically available... Wouldn't be much of a sanctions list if you couldn't https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-sanctions-consolidated-list-of-targets/consolidated-list-of-targets https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/financial-sanctio...
- xordon 4y ago
  Sanctioned persons are not the same as politically exposed persons. You are still allowed to do business with PEPs.

satellite2 4y ago

Those are blacklists, i.e. known criminals. The US is asking for whitelists, i.e. everyone and without motives

jeremyjh 4y ago
No it isn’t. There is no bulk access, just responses to queries of biometric data for persons of interest.
- chaps 4y ago
  That "just" is holding an enormous weight there, friend. Have you seen the query responses themselves to know whether they're not not getting back bulk info? And have you seen the giant private-public systems they'll want to funnel this info into? Just from my own research on surveillance, I got back a bunch of records in a FOIA lawsuit that included the the query results of a bunch of license plate scans. Large XML blobs. For whatever reason, they didn't redact a few thousand pages of those query results. A lot more info was in those query responses than you'd imagine. For example, SSNs of people whose license plates matched the first three digits of a "person of interest"'s car. Mind you, this was after them arguing for months, with affidavits, that they don't have audit logs. So, yeah.
- still_grokking 4y ago
  Sure, sure, and the query looks like: SELECT * FROM Person JOIN Biometric_Datum ON Person.id = Biometric_Datum.person_id; See, no bulk access. Just a response to a query, only once an day, or so.

devoutsalsa 4y ago

On the related topic of Arabic names, I currently visiting Tunisia. The other day I asked one of my friends how to spell her name using Latin letters, and she said “you can use one C, two Cs, one K, it doesn’t matter.” Now I’m wondering how many people have problems because their names have been casually spelled a few different ways and linked to someone else’s name in accident.

ghostDancer 4y ago
It has already happened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List#False_positives
moloch-hai 4y ago
The US doesn't care: if your name seems to match a terrorist's, you are that terrorist.
master_crab 4y ago
This is a problem with all transliterated languages. It’s worse for Arabs because until modern times they didn’t have “conventional” surnames. Their name was a composition of a given name plus that of their forefathers’, often appended with “Abu” (meaning father in Arabic), and sometimes the addition of a clan name. In my ancestral home of Egypt, the government often standardized everyone about 100-150 years ago with whatever names they were carrying at the time. So you could be completely unrelated to someone and have a partially matching last name. Combine that with America’s gleefully racist views of Arabs - particularly after 9/11 - and you have a recipe for disaster with no-fly lists.

miohtama 4y ago

This. There is nothing scientific about anti-money laundering. It is one of the ways modern nations hang themselves with self-inflictes inefficiencies for very little gains. Because it's run by police organisations, you cannot criticise it as you would be labelled as a friend of terrorists.