Ellen Nakashima at WashPo today reports that many private businesses are finding it advisable to use a Treasury Dept.-supplied list of "suspected terrorists" and "drug dealers" to avoid falling foul of the law. If a business knowingly does business with someone on the list, possible penalties include $10m in fines, and 10-30 years in prison. A little more below...
Bureaucratic initiatives like this have a tendency towards expansion, not contraction. I fear that we are creeping into a culture where such routine intrusiveness will be taken as a given, rather than an exception. Nakashima notes, for example, how one couple were denied a house mortgage on the basis on a false name-match to the list (husband's middle name is "Hussan"--which of course means that he might be a son of Saddam [!!]). Another couple wanted to buy a treadmill on a finance-plan, but were embarrassingly forced to wait for 3 days while a background check was performed. (Dammit--"treadmills don't kill people, people do!")
"The law is ridiculous," said Tom Hudson, a lawyer in Hanover, Md., who advises car dealers to use the list to avoid penalties. "It prohibits anyone from doing business with anyone who's on the list. It does not have a minimum dollar amount. . . . The local deli, if it sells a sandwich to someone whose name appears on the list, has violated the law."
In many cases, it seems, the flag on the credit report remains difficult to erase.
We were warned about this crap a century and more ago by Max Weber.