What would be crazy is if we could not buy mentos and coke due to watch lists, just picture the science at Tescos or Wallmart (but you can buy real Guns at Wallmart in some states! With amo!)
My therory...
What would be interesting to find out (well actually very dull) is how these ordering systems work for an international company like Farnell. Just think of the following situation...
Farnell/ element 14 buys 10000 resistors from vishay say..
The route to get 10 of these resistors in the post to your door is ridiculously complicated fortunately its mostly automated through computers. There must be upwards of 40 transactions and steps needed just to get these parts. I know this from talking to friend who writes e commerce software as a job. Just think of tax laws, accountancy laws, stock control, kanban, purchasing, parts availability, currency conversions, shipping and billing addresses, customs etc then I think to trade with the USA you need to put some extra steps for accountancy etc ( I am an engineer not an accountant). And the software has to talk with an old computer based stock control systems that you inherited when buying a subsidiary company, this is precisely why these large companies use "obsolete" stock control software as it would be a very complicated and expensive job to update it. I reckon it would cost Farnell upwards of 20 million pounds just to do the upgrade.
As for watch lists, given the above complexity where transactions bounce between a labarynth of computer systems I am not surprised. It just makes the customer feel that extra special ;-( not, so I totally understand why Dave was miffed when he found out as I would be.
Companies are s#*t scared of being finned by their own government that export controls become a pain in the arse even for domestic customers! I think this is going to happen more and more...
I have had experience of this kind of thing where I had to get an export licence to send a "tech support" email to Pakistan about equipment we stopped making 25 years ago. Yep.. you can contravene UK export controls by clicking send on any email where you give any technical information to the wrong company/organisation, even if they are in your own country! Just make sure you know who the end user is.
As we all now know that Osama bin larden is now dead you could use that name.