Element 14 Holding Orders Based On US Government Watch List

Of course they do, it&#x27;s yet another chance to punish their customers.<p>I ordered from Newark&#x2F;Element14 once, doing battle with and finally prevailing over their extremely clunky online system. It took several days for my $100 order to even ship, and it eventually showed up in two gigantic boxes (a few 4ft pieces of heat shrink tubing had obviously required their own 4ft long box). The packing materials and shipping must have totaled at least $100, to say nothing of the obviously manual labor.<p>I&#x27;ve no idea how they stay in business.

&gt;&gt;&gt; (International customers have to fill out silly forms with US distributors and manufacturers saying we won’t use the parts in nuclear weapons – seriously)<p>True. One of my first jobs was at a US electronics manufacturer &#x2F; parts distributor. I remember we had to fill out paperwork for every export and all of our products (mainly smoke detectors) had to be classified as something to the effect of &quot;parts that could be used to build a nuclear weapon&quot;. Ridiculous.

The most impressive thing about this is that someone managed to successfully complete an order at Element14, where registration before ordering is compulsory (and can take up to a dozen attempts because the site throws random 500 errors almost everywhere), and where Visa cards are required to have start dates even though most of them don&#x27;t, and where they don&#x27;t answer your email telling them about the errors.

This is actually great news. It has been impossible to find out whether you are on the US watch list. Now you have to do is get an Australian with your name to order something from Element 14 and now you know.

I never would have imagined that an Australian ordering from a UK company would have to feel my pain, but welcome to the club.<p>My father has the exact same name as the blogger, which also makes up 2&#x2F;3 of my own name. We&#x27;ve had similar orders from out of the country held up for weeks, been extremely slowed when trying to fly. It&#x27;s not a very fun game.

Damn, I&#x27;ll have to eat my words...<p>In an earlier hn post, I actually suggested that if you use a name that&#x27;s common enough, like David Fricken Jones, the US would never have the guts to flag it.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240983" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7240983</a><p>But here we are. David Jones... Not a lot of people affected by that, huh.

Glad to see the EEVBlog here.. I have been learning a LOT from his videos. If you are at all interested in electronics I would highly recommend checking it out.

Export restrictions have been in place for a very long time.<p>Another relatively well-known distributor that got bitten is McMaster-Carr, a mechanical parts supplier (with a very nice web design - <a href="http://mcmaster.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mcmaster.com&#x2F;</a>).<p>After shipping something to a location they shouldn&#x27;t have, they were penalized in 2003 and they no longer ship outside the US. Which is a damn shame, because they have a great catalogue of stuff that&#x27;s very easy to navigate.

I laughed at this:<p><i>The “fix” is to move your name to the 2nd line so it doesn’t get flagged</i>

I hate to say it, but from an engineering&#x2F;UX perspective, a secure and reliable federal identity API would make a lot of sense.<p>As long as they&#x27;re going to have a blacklist like this, they may as well do it correctly. Names do not individually identify people and it&#x27;s ridiculous that security-sensitive processes still use names as primary identifiers in this era.<p>You&#x27;re also not actually losing any anonymity - an online order is already linked to a physical address and a credit card (which is in turn linked to a real identity). A central ID API only gets Big Brother-ish if its use is mandated for previously pseudonymous interactions (say, HN or Reddit comments).

an obvious hacker question<p>What happens when you change your name to a dead terrorists name?<p>Is there no in government somewhat curious about all the holes in their watch list implementation..

What happens if some one has name like John Doe ? This is the stupiest implementation of system ever. It needs an award. Seriously, very funny article.

I had no idea grep was so effective in fighting terror.

I find it quite humorous that the governments that actually signed these deals are given a free pass, brilliant.