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

Heard about this

[Anonymous Coward]

This also happened when Cowboy Neal was mistakenly identified as Kh'alid bin Naoul.

Man...

[Faust7]

Many airlines rely on name-searching software derived from "Soundex," a 120- year-old indexing system first used in the 1880 U.S. census.

...and you thought mainframes were legacy technology.

Pity the unfortunately named

[sssmashy]

Soundex gives each name a key using its first letter and dropping the vowels and giving number codes to similar-sounding vowels (like "S" and "C"). The system gives the same code, L350, for "Laden" and all similar-sounding names: Lydon, Lawton, and Leedham.

Boy, I'd hate to be a guy with a name like "Sam Lawton" or something. I wonder how many similarly-named middle-aged salesmen are getting red-flagged on flights... because you just never know, what if Osama Bin Laden disguised as a portly white guy from Milwaukee, and he never bothered to pick a false name that sounded sufficiently different from the original.

Re:Soundex???

[Old Wolf]

That's a bit insulting to first-years, don't you think?
On my course, in the section on name recognition, we first learned Soundex, and then learned Obershelp, along with the fact that the latter is far more accurate, and Soundex is pretty crap.

Perhaps it was written by people with no education..

Re:The problem...

[eyegone]

Before 9/11 we had Timothy McVeigh and no one was hollering that rednecks shouldn't be allowed to drive trucks.

I've been hollering that rednecks shouldn't be allowed to drive trucks (or anything else) since I moved to Texas in '96.

This had me laughing so hard...

[mark-t]

... I had to take a break to catch my breath.

From the article:

Soundex gives each name a key using its first letter and dropping the vowels and giving number codes to similar-sounding vowels (like "S" and "C").

Hate to break it to these guys but neither "S" nor "C" are vowels. Heck, they don't even make vowel sounds.

Geeze, no wonder the system is broken.

Re:Soundex???

[Surak]

But to me, finding terrorists by checking their names against no-fly lists sounds just about as useful as checking IP packets for an Evil bit, doesn't it?

Are you trying to tell me that the RFC 3514 patch I wrote for the Linux kernel back in April is useless?!