General > General Technical Chat
Digikey keeps flagging me for Export Compliance
frogg:
--- Quote from: pdenisowski on September 16, 2023, 01:54:13 pm ---There's a reason a lot of manufacturers have their employees take mandatory export compliance training every year. Ask Keysight :
https://www.state.gov/u-s-department-of-state-concludes-6-6-million-settlement-of-alleged-export-violations-by-keysight-technologies-inc/
Not casting shade on Keysight: it's very easy to (innocently) get in trouble if you aren't careful, and companies like DigiKey are probably erring on the side of caution.
--- End quote ---
I'd like to explain it away as a matter of "compliance" but compliance to what? I'm buying parts as a US Citizen, sending them to my home address which is very obviously in the USA. So what's the triggering factor other than my name? My first name is about as Wonder Bread / "Mom and Apple Pie" as you can get, by the way.
I can't believe this is somehow related to export compliance when it is very obviously being sent to a home address in the USA.
Has anyone on here who does not have an Asian or Arab last name gotten hit with the export compliance check at Digikey?
TimFox:
Note that "compliance" here includes that you will not export the item to a bad place.
ywara:
--- Quote from: frogg on September 16, 2023, 09:49:33 pm ---I'd like to explain it away as a matter of "compliance" but compliance to what? I'm buying parts as a US Citizen, sending them to my home address which is very obviously in the USA. So what's the triggering factor other than my name? My first name is about as Wonder Bread / "Mom and Apple Pie" as you can get, by the way.
I can't believe this is somehow related to export compliance when it is very obviously being sent to a home address in the USA.
--- End quote ---
I can assure you that people with whitebread names and USA house addresses can and do get dinged and end up on one of the numerous lists that digikey may be screening against.
You can use this search and see (maybe) what you're being flagged for.
https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/csl-search
TimFox:
A recent post by the US Department of Justice about illegal exports and money laundering from US locations:
https://www.justice.gov/nsd/export-control-news
Most of the perpetrators named have Chinese, Slavic, Iranian, or Arabic surnames, but looking back to 2022 I found one named "Robertson", another named "Hunt", a "Griffith", and a disgraced FBI agent named "McGonigal".
frogg:
--- Quote from: TimFox on September 16, 2023, 10:58:13 pm ---A recent post by the US Department of Justice about illegal exports and money laundering from US locations
--- End quote ---
I'm not sure I understand what that has to do with me. What's your point exactly?
--- Quote from: ywara on September 16, 2023, 10:46:00 pm ---I can assure you that people with whitebread names and USA house addresses can and do get dinged and end up on one of the numerous lists that digikey may be screening against.
You can use this search and see (maybe) what you're being flagged for.
--- End quote ---
I can assure you that neither my name nor address are anywhere in that database.
I think some folks who are responding to this aren't getting my point: I don't mind if my Digikey orders get checked against some kind of spook database. What do I care? Go ahead.
What I consider problematic is that my name and address are most certainly not in any of those databases, yet Digikey consistently fails to ship my order until I call them and give them info they already have (my name and my phone number), after which I then have to wait a few days until they actually ship the order. What's the point? I even had an order a month ago that literally never shipped from Digikey, just because they failed to contact me that the parts were withheld for reasons of export compliance. I didn't even realize that they didn't ship until I needed the parts for the board I was building. What's even more infuriating is that they ended up shipping the parts for the withheld order after I called them and complained. They apologized, but again: What the heck is this system preventing? Does an angry phone call somehow verify that I'm not a bad guy?
The fact that I could order this stuff under an alias makes me realize that this is probably even more obviously racist than I thought it was. I shouldn't have to use a fake name just to buy some common SMD resistors and capacitors.
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