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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

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'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jones

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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.

nitpick: all names are hard to infer nationality from.

you could be thinking of ethnicity, which might be easier, but nationality definitely not

see: stephen law. american? british? australian? new zealand? canadian? south african? dutch? french? danish? jamaican? bahamian? chinese? singaporean? HK?

nationality means citizenship, which means which passport you carry. it has nothing to do with names.

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.

Yes, you wouldn't want to use a merely common name but rather an extremely common name.

When I Google Stephen Law, I actually get the Stephen Law who wrote article.

When I Google David Jones, I get the company and then the lengthy Wikipedia disambiguation page.

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.

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