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Comment by srl | Hacker News Reader

"In conclusion, I love my country and like our lawyers and hate our bank, like all good Americans." Oh my sides.

I get the dim sense, knowing nothing about this stuff, that the job of that office is one of the more headache-inducing ones in administrative government. Preventing people to sending money to (or receiving money from) a list of bad actors is a horridly difficult thing to begin with, but then when they screw up (either like this or in the more common case of money getting through), placing the blame is easy.

On another note, I haven't the faintest idea what the meaning of "blue sky" is, and I can't find anything by searching. Anybody know?

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The part that gets me about this story isn't the mistaken flagging -- any screening system is going to have its false positives. It's the "our lawyers were essentially flagged as an entity which we can never pay through online bill payment again" part. I could understand a temporary lock on electronic transactions between these two parties while the case is being investigated, but once it's determined that the case is a false positive, what's the logic of not lifting the ban and letting the two parties do business electronically again?

I fear that the answer is something stupid like "we put you on a list, and now that you're on the list you can never get off." Which seems like a policy designed to make life easier for Treasury (or whomever maintains The List) rather than for the wrongly identified parties who now have to suffer for the rest of their lives due to somebody else's mistake. At a minimum there ought to be a process for people who end up on The List by mistake to appeal their inclusion.

In their minds there may be more downside to taking someone off the list than leaving them on.

"You already had this terrorist-funding org on the list and you took them OFF?!?!?"

Some blogger complaining that the gummint is stoopid. (Something everyone already knows).

Yeah, to be clear, I wrote this up because it's unfortunate and weird, not to vilify folks at the Treasury Department who have an unenviably difficult job. I don't think this one false positive for me is a huge burden (and most of the inconvenience is due to my bank, not the Treasury Dept).

On the other hand, I know that the next time I'm coming back gone to the U.S. from abroad, especially being a brown dude with a beard who has family in Sourh Asia, I'm gonna have to deal with this. That was part of my reason for publishing it now.

Why NOT vilify the folks at the treasury? Why so polite?

Did you not read his second paragraph? It's right there.

..and you think being polite is going to stop the powers that be from messing with him when he re-enters the country? Interesting...

It's between the lines.

Because every effort like this will have false positives and I don't think it's meaningless overall. If my goal were to change policy, I'd have addressed this to my congressperson, and reached out to Treasury, not talking about it on HN.

apparently not that difficult of a job, since i could literarily replace them with as shell script, as the joke goes.

Apart from other meanings mentioned here, in US legal history the "blue sky" laws came in to stop people selling securities for bogus or unlikely business ventures. I don't think OFAC is necessarily directly concerned with this, in this case, but the company they sued may have inadvertently mocked the business law by using the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_sky_law

> I haven't the faintest idea what the meaning of "blue sky" is, and I can't find anything by searching.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/blue-sky+thinking and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blue-sky_thinking

"Blue sky" is a weather condition in which there are no clouds in the sky.

/sarcasm

Apparently it's a form of methamphetamine

More like a fictional form from "Breaking Bad."

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