False Positives, Few Matches Plague 'No-Fly' List

lindner writes "According to a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the United States No-Fly List uses a soundex algorithm to match names. Designed 'to quickly summon passenger names or to catch deal-hunting passengers making duplicate bookings.' The system has only managed to rack up a slew of false-positives, including everyone matching soundex ("J. Adams") at one point in time. The problem has gotten so bad that there is now a "Fly List" for chronically misidentified passengers."

Comments

Re:Deal hunting?

[ajuda]

So what's wrong with passengers hunting for the best deal? I thought that's what the free-market and capitalism were all about.

Nope. Capitalism is all about letting businesses squeeze every penny out of consumers. Maximizing for the consumer would be socialism, you commie bastard.

Arabic Alphabet

[Anonymous Coward]

the English-based name-search software used by airline-reservation databases is easily flummoxed by Arabic, Asian and other names that, when converted from their native script to the Roman alphabet, can have hundreds of legitimate different spellings.

Here we can see the legitimate security risk that the US invasion of Iraq has thwarted. We can finally stop the Iraqis from using those squiggly things they use to spell their names and get them using English like everyone else.

Watch list is not a bad idea

[sco08y]

One knee-jerk reaction people have, particularly leftists, is that the watch list is useless and easily evaded, and that it merely exists to make people feel secure.

The reason I single out liberals is that it's a problem they have with evaluating many other issues. In and of itself, a watch list doesn't do much. And this is a standard failure of analysis: it's easy to pooh-pooh any technique on its own, especially in matters of security or warfare, but that fails to see how it fits into the big picture. Terrorists have limited resources, and this forces them to divert those limited resources into getting false papers. It forces them to have to deal with more people, leaving a longer trail of evidence. When you're doing security, you're playing defense because you can never anticipate precisely what they'll do. What you want to do is force your opponent to take as many chances as possible, and ensure that at any point a mistake will foil them.

Any single measure, whether baggage screening, watch lists, can *not* be rationally analyzed independent of a whole system of checks and doublechecks.

Most egregious is the ACLU's highly irresponsible claim that this is a violation of civil liberties. False positives are *not* a violation of civil liberties. You do not have a right to convenience. You do not have an absolute right to fly because you're sharing that plane with 300 other people. This is just grandstanding by the ACLU. If they want to trash the administration, fine, but drop the sanctimony of civil liberties.