Digikey are checking orders against the US Denied Persons list and holding orders until you can prove your generic name is not that person on the list.
Also, Element14 doing a similar thing.
I just saw this, and thought it was hilarious.
However, this is not likely a "false positive". There's only one Dave Jones that the watch-list cares about. And it's the very same Dave Jones here.
What is not factored into this in the discussion so far, is that human beings are not creating this watch list. The list is being generated by Artificial Intelligence software, that takes lots of data as input from various sources, and uses "heuristics" to estimate and "guess" the names that should be on that list. It's all "automatic."
Now, the United States has strict rules on who in the world is entitled to be "educated" on technical matters. Dave Jones is an "educator" and is in violation of the US rules, since he doesn't restrict his electronics teaching to only "acceptable" countries.
If you try, for example, to sign up for the famous "Circuits and Electronics" course from MIT available on edX online platform, for example, you'll see that if you are from certain countries like Cuba or Iran, they'll tell you they are sorry, but you're not allowed to take the course. You'll see a message saying it's against the US rules to educate people in these countries.
So, what the AI program does, is search through all the data on the internet, and check who is violating the US rules and policies, and puts that person on the watchlist.
The AI program doesn't know who "Dave Jones" is, just that a person with that name is "teaching electronics" in an "unrestricted" manner, making this "sensitive technical material" available to persons in restricted countries. That's all it is.
It may seem like a silly thing, and an invasion of privacy, but the problem is really that "Dave Jones" used his real name for his blog and youtube channel etc..and therein lies the problem.
There's a reason that Actors use "Stage Names" that are different from their "Real Names", and it's to keep their private life somewhat separate from their public life, so that they could have some privacy, and avoid being "picked on" by various elements of the system. Writers often do the same thing, having a fictional author name etc..
I can guarantee you, that if Dave used a stage name, like say "John Smith", then the John Smith would be the "generic" name on the watchlist, and when Dave went himself to order electronics parts, he'd never have a problem. He'd only have created problems for anyone named "John Smith."
The AI program isn't smart enough to look behind stage names, to figure out the real names of the actors. We haven't gotten to that level of sophistication yet. That would have to be done by a human investigative team. The fact that all these generic names are appearing on the watchlist is proof that a dumb piece of software, masquerading as "Artificial Intelligence" is at work behind the scenes.
It's wise to be anonymous on the internet wherever you can.