The Hassles of Home-Buying

As Newsweek reports, one more step has been added to our ability to buy a home: checking your name against a terrorist watch list. Some excerpts:

The Treasury Department?s Office of Foreign Assets Control maintains the ?specifically designated nationals? (SDN) list of people blocked from participating in ?any transaction or dealing ? in property or interests? within the United States. These people have been identified ?to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism,? according to White House Executive Order 13224, which was issued Sept. 24, 2001. Although the blocked-persons list has been around in some form for about a decade, under the order private individuals (be they jewelers, pawnbrokers or suburban families) buying or selling property are now considered ?financial institutions? by the government. And the responsibility has fallen to the title companies to check all parties involved in a transaction against the list.
…..
But does it work? That depends on the search software. Typing ?Osama bin Laden? into the ALTA [American Land Title Association] search engine yields zero matches, but that?s because the U.S. government spells his name ?Usama bin Laden? (which gets two hits)….. In the event of a match, the transaction must be immediately halted and a report filed with the Treasury Department. Failure of a title company to comply could result in fines of up to $65,000 under the Trading with the Enemy Act…..
Still, is someone like Osama bin Laden, who knows he is a wanted man, about to conduct business on U.S. soil without using an alias or establishing a dummy corporation? ?It?s rare that somebody of this type is going to do business as a name on the list,? says attorney Carl A. Valenstein, a partner at Thelen Reid & Priest in Washington, D.C. ?They?re very well aware. There are so many ways with offshore companies, with aliases, with all sorts of things to disguise this. I?m very skeptical that it works.?

Comments

[a usual suspect]

Even if no terrorist would be stupid enough to use his real name to buy a house, the fact remains that we're at war here people! 3,000 people died on 9/11 and we need to do something to show that we mean business!

So suck it up, hand over your tweezers, and fill out a few more forms when you buy a home. It's for the good of the country!

[James]

It depends on what you mean by "does it work?" If you mean "does it reassure the useful idiots that the government is taking action against terrorism and gets them to troop down to the polls to vote for the incumbents?", then the answer is "yes."

If you mean, "does it give the government more access to our private business and information they can use to enforce their ever-expanding galaxy of laws and regulations?", then the answer is "yes."

If you mean, "will it enable us to catch a terrorist trying to buy a summer home in the Hamptons?", then the answer is almost certainly "no."

This is just another perfect example of how a security obsession is exploited by cynical politicians and bureaucrats.

[kmw]

I'm just an evil non theist, so my opinion is worth shit, but... Don't the zealous Religious Right people want to start considering that maybe Dubya is the anti-christ?

I mean, doesn't their holy book say something about the "beast" abolishing buying and selling without a certain mark?

Again, I'm a non theist, so I think the whole idea preposterous, but tell me -- where'd all the superstition nut cases from the '80s go? They spent the better part of the decade arguing who was Satan's anointed.

[Mo]

For Federales reading this, if I ever make it on the list my name is spelled Mustapha. That goes for any "This guy can't buy a gun list" as well. 😉

[xray]

KMW: They read the left behind series.

[kmw]

xray, I must admit zero desire to read anything written by LaHaye. So tell me, does the "left behind" series actually name an antichrist?

Perhaps the better question is, do they carp that any Republican may be safely excluded from the antichrist list?

I'm just trying to figure out how come Reagan got fingered several times in the '80s, and Dubya hasn't been pointed at once, to my knowledge.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

You guys can bitch all you want, but I, for one, don't want any crazed terrorists moving next door to ME. All the celebratory gun fire during weddings and birthday parties can be really irritating.. not to mention the hostage-taking and murders.

[B.P.]

Apart from the efficacy of the watch list, what's the likelihood that a terrorist operative is going to enter the housing market?

[Highway]

This is another one chucked in the bin of 'great ideas in a total vacuum.' Actual chance of catching an actual terrorist: Between slim and none, since as has been pointed out, the terrorists aren't using their real names unless they're stupider than the feds who think these idiotic policies up. In which circumstance a good case could be made that they deserved to get caught.

[Will]

Most days it seems like the Federal government exists solely for the purpose of wrecking the U.S. economy.

This is one of those days.

[zorel]

kmw,

before 2000 election, I had read a website that chronicled how Bush was the anti-christ. I believe the person who wrote the stuff was from Texas (based on how he was listing obscure TX stuff). there were references to people who were murdered (for the benefit of W) and biblical verses, etc. that I almost believed dubya was the anti-christ 🙂

[Kevin Carson]

The typical rationale for any government policy: we've got to do *something*; x is something; therefore we've got to do x. For the children, of course.