Colleen Tunney-Ryan, a TransUnion spokeswoman who perhaps has memorized key sections of 'Thank You For Smoking,' says the people who order the credit reports agree not to take any action based on the reports. The idea that lenders order the reports only to ignore them makes a sort of exquisite sense that 27B cherishes.

The denied party list has never been enforced for normal domestic transactions. Some companies shipping export controlled commodities check it, but McDonalds, for example, does not face prosecution for failing to perform a DPL check before selling you a hamburger.

Much like employee drug screening this is an example of companies overzealously participating in law enforcement. The really scary part is, however, that the law is not totally clear on the fact that McDonalds isn't required to perform checks, and so as companies embrace this it could result in decisions by Commerce to start requiring it in some contexts.

The end result is that if for some reason you are a partial match, which happens all the time, you are going to find yourself facing real hassles, as the companies that are implementing this voluntarily probably aren't staffing to clear false positives efficiently. How many people named John Hernandez do you think there are in the United States. I'm guessing a lot.

This is where the anti terror efforts really start to screw up people's lives