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TSA Missed Boston Bomber Because His Name Was Misspelled In a Database

schwit1 sends this news from The Verge: "Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the primary conspirator in the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people, slipped through airport security because his name was misspelled in a database, according to a new Congressional report. The Russian intelligence agency warned U.S. authorities twice that Tsarnaev was a radical Islamist and potentially dangerous. As a result, Tsarnaev was entered into two U.S. government databases: the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment and the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS), an interagency border inspection database.

A special note was added to TECS in October of 2011 requiring a mandatory search and detention of Tsarnaev if he left the country. 'Detain isolated and immediately call the lookout duty officer,' the note reportedly said. 'Call is mandatory whether or not the officer believes there is an exact match.' 'Detain isolated and immediately call the lookout duty officer.' Unfortunately, Tsarnaev's name was not an exact match: it was misspelled by one letter. Whoever entered it in the database spelled it as 'Tsarnayev.' When Tsarnaev flew to Russia in January of 2012 on his way to terrorist training, the system was alerted but the mandatory detention was not triggered. Because officers did not realize Tsarnaev was a high-priority target, he was allowed to travel without questioning."

275 comments

  1. Jeez by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's a bomber, I mean bummer.

    1. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      More like hope he will chance amirite?

    2. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Idk, I was hoping for no more change until he leaves office.

    3. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Hate to see the guy that was mistaken as the terrorist because of a wrong letter.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
      >One day he is assigned the task of trying to rectify an error caused by a fly getting jammed in a printer, which caused it to misprint a file, resulting in the incarceration and death during interrogation of Mr. Archibald Buttle instead of the suspected "terrorist", Archibald Tuttle.

      Good movie.

    4. Re:Jeez by maz2331 · · Score: 1

      No, a Bimmer!

    5. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      True, but it is unfortunate we are living so close to the reality in the film.

    6. Re:Jeez by MrBigInThePants · · Score: 1

      Too Tsunami.

      Besides which you cannot possibly blame the TSA. They were faaaaaaaaarrrrrr too busy patting down 5 yr olds/senior citizens and running hot girls through the "porno scanner" to be bothered hunting for real terrorists.

      I would say that all this shows how wisely spent all those billions were.

    7. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is frightening both ways. Amerikns are (in)famous bad spellars.
      A wanted name spelled wrong - missed, deaths may result.
      An innocent name spelled wrong - crap and drama for some poor soul.
      Edumacation people, edumacation.

    8. Re:Jeez by idontgno · · Score: 1

      Heinrich Bimmler? From Minehead? I have no idea why the TSA would be interested in him. After all, he wasn't the head of the Gestapo for 10 years... I mean, 5 years... I mean never.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    9. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You wood think only TSA agents whoo went to skool wood get hiered.

    10. Re:Jeez by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Ok, so... I work for a place which still uses an older DataBase management system... dBase 5 for Dos.

      Anyhow, one day, some years ago, while I'm sitting at my desk, a person who's responsible for doing the daily batch processing update of customer accounts comes to my desk and says.. "Hey, I've got a customer account who seems to have two accounts, can you help me? "

      I say 'sure' and follow him to the system on which this 'master file update' usually takes place, and sit down to look at the problem with the customer account....

      Now, mind you this is 2003-4, and we're still using green-bar, 133 column dot-matrix printers to print out reports, and such.. but he points at the greenbar printout of the customer account, and says.. the customer's last name is Buttle...

      I laugh to myself and start asking 'so what's the other customer's name and he pushes the green-bar printout towards me and says 'this is the guy right here...' I take the printout and look at the other customer's name and feel all the blood rush out of my face when I read the last name 'Tuttle'.....

      I shit you not.. I pushed back the chair I was sitting in and stand up and say... "NO.... I'm not touching this account.. I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO 'FIX' THIS ACCOUNT, I'M SORRY, BUT I CANNOT DO THIS... YOU DO WHAT YOU WILL, BUT I'M NOT TOUCHING THIS ACCOUNT.... I'M GOING BACK TO MY DESK... FIGURE IT OUT ON YOUR OWN."

      It freaked me the fuck out.. I had to explain myself to the guy who'd asked for help, and, since he'd actually seen the film, but forgotten those details, he soon understood, but I've never been so viscerally freaked out by a clerical error before or since....

      Nowadays, whenever something weird like that pops up, I usually say something like "Central services!! We do the work, you do the pleasure!!" and we usually have a half hearted, slightly uncomfortable laugh, and then refuse to look each other in the eye for the rest of the day...

      TL;DR - As a DBA/IT guy, had almost the exact Fly in the teletype situation from the film 'Brazil' come up at work, freaked the fuck out... worked out in the end. Still laugh about it occasionally...

    11. Re:Jeez by Meski · · Score: 1

      I thought Google would come up with its helpful "Did you mean:" for that, but there's a metric shittonne of hits for it. ::)

  2. Who says computers will take over.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The most advanced systems in the world will never outpace human mistakes.

    1. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The most advanced systems in the world will never outpace human mistakes.

      If you type "Tsarnayev" (the way his name was incorrectly spelled" into Google, the first match is: wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_and_Tamerlan_Tsarnaev

      So I'll call bullshit on your claim, and also note that the database entry error was only the last in a long series of events. (try reading the article)

      The problem was not "human mistakes". The problem was a string of incompetent and corrupt police and FBI agents. Mistakes are accidents, the string of fuck-ups in this case were anything BUT mistakes.

    2. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Sique · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Never attribute to malice what sufficiently can be explained with stupidity.

      This is a clear case of "blinded by data".

      --
      .sig: Sique *sigh*
    3. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Eddi3 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm not at all disputing the idea of what you're saying. In fact, I agree that incompetence let this guy through.

      However, your example of googling this guy's name is a particularly bad one. Google's autocorrection algorithms are based on the popularity of terms and their similarities. Since the bombing, surely this name would have been googled millions of times.

      Do you really suppose that Google would have made such an accurate correction before the Boston attacks that madetheir family name infamous?

    4. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by reboot246 · · Score: 2

      My last name has at least four different spellings, maybe more. If you enter one of them into Google, some exact matches will be found. But, if you enter them into a genealogical search engine, all the variations of the name will be found. Google is good at what Google does, but it's not always the best search engine for every task.

    5. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by maz2331 · · Score: 1

      Garbage in, garbage out.

    6. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Anonymuous+Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      This is not a case of misspelling (think Notingham) or variant spelling (think Britney vs. Brittany). There's simply no standard way of transliterating Russian names. Cyrillic "e" may be pronounced "eh", "yeh", "yo", "o" or "ih" and some people will use some kind of phonetic approximation so they don't have their names too badly garbled.

      I would have expected them to include the original cyrillic name and all the /obvious/ transliterations in their database, but that's apparently way beyond their capabilities.

    7. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Eunuchswear · · Score: 1

      1. mod parent ++insightful

      2. imagine what happens for arabic names.

      --
      Watch this Heartland Institute video
    8. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by bickerdyke · · Score: 1

      Have you ever went through US Customs and Border? I would not expect their personel to be able to type in and search for any non-Ascii letters.

      And then, have a look at the affordable healthcare website debacle and you know what kind of "experts" are contracted by the gouvernment to design databases.

      --
      bickerdyke
    9. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Stripe7 · · Score: 1

      That makes me curious about how they go about putting Chinese names in either the terrorist list or no fly lists. The Chinese name Chan, Chin, Tan, Chun etc... are all the same Chinese character for a last name on a Chinese passport.

    10. Re: Who says computers will take over.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm working a temp job right now doing data entry for an insurance company. Chinese names are one of the things that the system has a hard time handling because of how many people have the same or very similar last names. Usually we have to rely on SSNs to determine who is who, and I can't even imagine trying to do it without an SSN.

    11. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      Never attribute to malice what sufficiently can be explained with stupidity.

      This is a clear case of "blinded by data".

      Garbage in, Gospel Out.

    12. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Bartles · · Score: 1

      No, it's a clear case of we fucked up and people died. The explanation is that it was unavoidable, and funny enough, you see, someone just made a spelling mistake and that's why we didn't catch the guy. Totally unavoidable.

    13. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by cjellibebi · · Score: 1

      According to the Wikipedia article on the Romanization of Russian, the difference can be seen in the 1997 passport transliteration system and the 2010 passport transliteration system.

    14. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by chihowa · · Score: 1

      Have you ever went through US Customs and Border? I would not expect their personel to be able to type in and search for any non-Ascii letters.

      Have you? They don't type in and search the names on passports. Any passports in use have a standardized machine readable section (with transliteration conducted by the issuing state). Automatically testing other transliterations wouldn't be that hard of a task.

      --
      If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
    15. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Cro+Magnon · · Score: 1

      My first name has at least 3 spellings, and mine is the least common of them. My last name has 3 or 4 that I can think of. That's a lot of variations on my name. Surely, one of those is a terrorist!

      --
      Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
    16. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      And he could have translitterated from Cyrillic to Tsarnayev himself and bypassed the no-fly list!

    17. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by bickerdyke · · Score: 2

      I've been and they scanned and typed quite a lot, so I don't know if they used my data from the machine or human readable zone.

      But then again. It wouldn't be that easy. Your link states that the machine readable zone contains the ICAO transliteration. You may have that, but you can't check for any other transliterations unles you have the original name that you can try various transliteration systems on. Transliteration works like a hash function here: you can't run it backwards to see the original input. Similar, yes, but our whole problem is that "similar" has been missed at least once so far.

      Diving deeper into your links I found that information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

      It seems that the method used for passports and other official documents changed quite frequently: 1997, 2010, 2013. Depending on the year the records were created, different systems may have been in use, leading to this oversight. And they will continue running into that kind of problem until they leave behind that 1970's computer ASCII code and move on to Unicode.

      The rule of thumb that any non-western alphabet belongs to some backward country and can be ignored holds no longer true.

      --
      bickerdyke
    18. Re: Who says computers will take over.... by plopez · · Score: 1

      Let's not forget those Chinese who adopt English first names

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    19. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by laie_techie · · Score: 1

      My first name has at least 3 spellings, and mine is the least common of them. My last name has 3 or 4 that I can think of. That's a lot of variations on my name. Surely, one of those is a terrorist!

      There are 86 common variations of my surname. I know that there individuals with my same first name with 5 of those variations, plus an additional three who use my exact surname. Mistaken identity is fun!

    20. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by david672orford · · Score: 1

      Another problem with transliteration is that standard systems often produce results which look very odd to English speakers. For example, under the 1997 passport system would be transliterated Mariya. Under the 2010 system it would be Mariia which is even worse. But there already is a standard spelling of this name in English: Maria.

      I know of two people who asked the workers in an Eastern European passport office to transliterate their names in a particular way. Both requests were accepted without argument.

      Tsarnayev is an example of such an odd result which one might wish to change to Tsarnaev.

      For a general discussion about the ways actual people's names can cause problems for computer programmers, see:

      http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

    21. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by bickerdyke · · Score: 1

      Gee, guess what I posted about 8 hours ago... *g*

      But as you said: There are completly begnin reasons to use a specific translation.

      --
      bickerdyke
    22. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      No, it's a clear case of we fucked up and people died. The explanation is that it was unavoidable, and funny enough, you see, someone just made a spelling mistake and that's why we didn't catch the guy. Totally unavoidable.

      It really reflects that names make really poor primary keys. Until we start tatooing guids on people at birth, we're going to have problems like this. Either you let the terrorist go because of a misspelling, or you detain everybody named "Mary Jane" because somebody with that name committed some crime.

    23. Re:Who says computers will take over.... by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Yup. Short of a lookup for a list of every name in every language on the planet, how is a computer going to realize that "Nadine," "Nadia," "Nadija," "Nadezda," and "Nadezhda" could be the same person? And that is just limiting ourselves to the 26 letters of the English alphabet.

  3. No. You do not get to pull this bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The TSA is operated by some of the most incompetent people the USA has to offer. They are the problem, not the hardware or software. I fail to see why they should get a "free pass" here on account of a bad database entry. Heads should be hung over this, especially considering the justifications thrown around for the continued existence of the TSA.

    1. Re:No. You do not get to pull this bullshit. by mrzaph0d · · Score: 1

      yeah, but whose head? if anyone, it'll be the guy who let him pass. the one earning $10 an hour. big deal. his supervisor (earning $12/hr), maybe gets written up. their manager? a stern talking to. that's it.

      --
      this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
    2. Re:No. You do not get to pull this bullshit. by blackraven14250 · · Score: 1

      The "bad database entry" wasn't a fault of the database. It was human error, and the summary makes that completely clear.

    3. Re:No. You do not get to pull this bullshit. by gargleblast · · Score: 1

      Yeah that'll be him. The guy with the shit job with the shit rules to follow. The perfect scapegoat.
      Not the moron who can't read and type at the same time.
      Not the "experts" who dreamed up the procedures this agency follows.
      Not the actual terrorist.
      The guy watching the passenger queue. Blame him.

    4. Re:No. You do not get to pull this bullshit. by cyn1c77 · · Score: 1

      The TSA is operated by some of the most incompetent people the USA has to offer. They are the problem, not the hardware or software. I fail to see why they should get a "free pass" here on account of a bad database entry. Heads should be hung over this, especially considering the justifications thrown around for the continued existence of the TSA.

      Yeah, and they will spin this concept to argue that they need more money so that they can hire:
      1. better quality staff,
      2. more training for the staff they have,
      3. advanced software,
      etc...

    5. Re:No. You do not get to pull this bullshit. by bickerdyke · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The TSA is operated by some of the most incompetent people the USA has to offer. They are the problem, not the hardware or software.

      Not neccessarily. The problem is the political setup of this whole thing.

      From top manager to front row goon: You're on the safe side as long as you never think and just follow orders. No mistakes will get you promoted at some point. But deviation from the rules will either let a terrorist slip through or earn you some re-training, if your manager sees it.

      And it's the same at the top tier: New security theater rules can always be explained as "inconvinient but neccessary". But lifting even the most stupid rule of all is only a personal risk, if at some point in time after lifting a rule an incident is indeed happening.

      So there is simply no incentive to be sensilbe.

      --
      bickerdyke
  4. Homer Simpson says it best by turp182 · · Score: 1

    Doh!!!

    --
    BlameBillCosby.com
  5. Lern 2 computer noobs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Copy Paste.
    It's not that hard.

  6. We already knew this way back in 2013 by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've seen this story about Russia giving us warnings about the Boston bomber floating around elsewhere recently, why is this news now? We knew this back in 2013.

    Despite the misspelling, the FBI interviewed him and determined he was no threat (unlike his friend who they interviewed after the bombing, and shot to death during the interview).

    So what would it have mattered if airport security searched him after one of his trips to Russia? It's almost certain he wasn't carrying anything that would have got him arrested.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:We already knew this way back in 2013 by penix1 · · Score: 1

      And if he was such a danger, why didn't the Russians detain him when he was there instead of letting him come back? I haven't seen that question asked yet.

      --
      This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
    2. Re:We already knew this way back in 2013 by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Because they didn't have any direct evidence of him being complicit in terrorist activities, and contrary to what you may have heard elsewhere, Russia still has some semblance of the rule of law?

    3. Re:We already knew this way back in 2013 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "the FBI interviewed him and determined he was no threat"

      You mean that's when the FBI recruited him and asked him to take part in an anti-terrorism training exercise ..

  7. Helpful links for intelligence community devs by rk · · Score: 4, Informative

    soundex

    Levenshtein distance

    Hamming distance

    More like this, can't be arsed to go looking them up, though. Those were three I knew off the cuff.

    1. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Cryacin · · Score: 5, Funny

      So, Mr oBama would have a Levenshtein distance of 1 with oSama then? Good job there.

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    2. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Mastacheata87 · · Score: 1

      This wouldn't have helped, according to the article.
      They didn't detain him because there was no exact match, despite the fact that there was an order to detain the person and call $superior-authority$ even if there was no exact match.
      The problem is the officer that noticed him and didn't take action, not the systems that flagged the person as potential terrorist.

    3. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Dragonslicer · · Score: 1, Informative

      So, Mr oBama would have a Levenshtein distance of 1 with oSama then? Good job there.

      If you were comparing only someone's first name to only someone else's last name, sure.

    4. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by laughingskeptic · · Score: 1

      Have you used these algorithms in this application? Apply these algorithms to all the last names in the Social Security death index http://ssdmf.info/download.htm... and evaluate your false positive and false negative stats. You will find that these are not generally helpful. It doesn't matter if an algorithm would have worked in one particular case if 99% of the time the algorithm drives the end user insane with useless results.

    5. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by vux984 · · Score: 2

      A major problem with soundex is false positives. A terrorist named John Smith on the watch list would be hell on a lot of people... but if they were using soundex... he's now J500 S530. So Now Jan, Jim, Jens, Jon, Jaymee, Jayne, Jane cross product with Smith, Smit, Smite, Smithe, Smithee, Smythe, Smathe, Snuthe, Smothe...

      all get caught in that web.

      Similar problems exist for hamming and so on. There's a LOT of very different names a very short "distance" from each other in nearly any scheme.

      But on top of all the false positives, your still going to miss people due to typos and data entry issues:

      David and Dacid is just fat fingering the keyboard and missing the v for c, resulting in a different soundex.

      Similarly Christy and Chritsy is simple transposition error during typing, resulting in a different soundex.

    6. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Charliemopps · · Score: 1

      So, Mr oBama would have a Levenshtein distance of 1 with oSama then? Good job there.

      Apparently you haven't read the comments section of the weekly standard lately.

    7. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by stdarg · · Score: 1

      That's a bad way to evaluate the false positive rate because it assumes the distribution of terrorist names is the same as the distribution of names in Social Security. In reality there aren't many Muslims in the US, so the false positive rate for the general population would be much lower. (It may be high for Muslims though, especially since from what I recall soundex etc aren't really optimized for non-Western names.)

      Not to mention, name matching is just step one of identification. I'm assuming there's also a picture that would pop up. If the person in front of you is an 80 year old man and the picture is a 17 old year kid, the security agent doesn't have to even mention it.

    8. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by stdarg · · Score: 1

      While you are raising valid concerns about algorithms like soundex, aren't they minor concerns? Yeah there could be a typo in the name. But in the case we're talking about, it wasn't a typo, it was an alternate phonetic spelling.

      And regarding false positives, luckily there aren't many terrorists today named John Smith. False positives would be restricted to relatively small populations anyway, like Muslims and non-Western names. How many "bin laden/bin ladin/bin ladan/ben laden/etc" names are there in the US? Maybe a few, who would all be false positives. So? That's still tiny.

      The other thing you're ignoring is that name matching is just part of identity verification. I find it unlikely that Russia gave us this name and nothing else. There was probably a picture as well, or a description. Some percentage of false positives would be eliminated on that basis. "Oh this guy is 80, we're looking for a teenager. Next."

    9. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by mescobal · · Score: 1

      So, Mr oBama would have a Levenshtein distance of 1 with oSama then? Good job there.

      And 0 distance with Hussein...

      --
      La culpa no es del chancho...
    10. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      If you were comparing only someone's first name to only someone else's last name, sure.

      Let's just hope that all the names are dumped in as keywords. Then he's got two interesting names.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    11. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      you are trying to educate the morons who made the "No Fly" list using only *names* ??

    12. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by vux984 · · Score: 2

      How many "bin laden/bin ladin/bin ladan/ben laden/etc" names are there in the US

      bin Laden is, if i recall correctly, little more than "son of Laden"

      Osama's full name per wikipedia is:

      Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden

      Granted its not a common American name, but as a middle eastern name, it might as well be Tom O'Conner.

      False positives would be restricted to relatively small populations anyway, like Muslims and non-Western names.

      Yes. Small populations, like "foreigners". This is not a good plan.

      The other thing you're ignoring is that name matching is just part of identity verification.

      I'm not ignoring it. I'm not suggesting we're going to be arresting muslim grandmothers, I'm just pointing out that false positives waste time, and a LOT of false positives is like the boy who cries wolf, the border agents will ignore them if the computer cries terrorists on every flight.

      Yeah there could be a typo in the name. But in the case we're talking about, it wasn't a typo, it was an alternate phonetic spelling.

      The point there was simply that it closes plugs one small whole in a very leaky boat.

    13. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Afty0r · · Score: 1

      Having worked in this arena, I can also say that Engram (or Qgram) analysis is excellent, and can be written in common SQL servers and perform very well compared with bit-shifting code methods.

    14. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Bartles · · Score: 1

      They know all this. They're just making up a story to mitigate accountability. They've done it before (Benghazi, FF), and they'll do it again. Judging by the reactions of the posters here at Slashdot, successfully.

    15. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 1

      In reality there aren't many Muslims in the US, so the false positive rate for the general population would be much lower.

      2.5 - 3 million, estimated Muslims in the USA.

      As to "muslim names", remember that Cat Stevens is Muslim.

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    16. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That won't help you much if John Smith decides to become a terrorist...

    17. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by madro · · Score: 1

      Health care applications typically don't have access to a master list of names. They use multiple criteria in addition to names to do master patient indexing. Similar names are an important component (Jaro-Winkler is a nice metric to consider), but are given less weight when the last name or first name is common. But if you include birth date, government identifiers (ssn, driver's license, medicaid/medicare), current/past addresses (allowing again for transposition or similar errors), your accuracy gets much better.

      No idea if government intelligence apps do this, but I would expect they do (or at least there are staff members who know what to do, if they could only convince higher-ups).

    18. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Those are valid concerns, however, a proper entity resolution engine should take into account multiple data points besides their name. I assume that the list given by the Russians would have other things like age, date of birth and place of birth. If you make on soundex "AND" match other key data points then it is likely not not be a false positive.

      I don't think this was a case of fat fingers but rather the typist not paying attention to how it was spelled and rather making up their own spelling based on how it sounded to them.

    19. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You were modded funny, but your comment is incredibly insightful.

      Namely that a small permutation can result in a completely different person...and the fact that the POTUS and the former leader of al-qaeda are merely "1 offs" of each other should illustrate that even with somewhat uncommon names, once you start looking at even the slightest misspelling possibilities, you're going to get an extremely large number of false positives.

    20. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by stdarg · · Score: 1

      2.5 - 3 million, estimated Muslims in the USA.

      So less than 1%.

      As to "muslim names", remember that Cat Stevens is Muslim.

      Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam.

    21. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by stdarg · · Score: 1

      Granted its not a common American name, but as a middle eastern name, it might as well be Tom O'Conner.

      That would be a problem if US airport security somehow was based in the Middle East, but it's not.

      Yes. Small populations, like "foreigners". This is not a good plan.

      Pretty much every country on Earth subjects foreigners to increased scrutiny. It's common sense.

      and a LOT of false positives is like the boy who cries wolf, the border agents will ignore them if the computer cries terrorists on every flight.

      That's unlikely.. there are already stupid things like not being allowed to bring shampoo on the plane. Border agents are not ignoring that stuff, and it's a lot less stupid to profile young Muslim men than to profile "everybody carrying more than 3oz of fluid" etc.

    22. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by vux984 · · Score: 1

      That's unlikely.. there are already stupid things like not being allowed to bring shampoo on the plane

      Its mostly a show. I know it. You know it. They know it. I've left oversize bottles in my bags lots of times. Half the time they miss them.

      Border agents are not ignoring that stuff, and it's a lot less stupid to profile young Muslim men than to profile "everybody carrying more than 3oz of fluid" etc.

      The Greater Toronto Area is nearly 8% muslims. If a planes destination is somewhere predominantly muslim, its pretty easy to be on a plane where they're the overwhelming majority.

      Odds are there are far more muslims on a given plane leaving Toronto than there are punters who forgot about the 3oz bottle limit.

      And if those planes are going anywhere predominantly "muslim", most of the passenger list might well be muslim.

      They aren't exactly "rare", and they're virtually all perfectly regular people. Students, businessmen, tourists. I say there more actual active serial killers in the USA then actual Islamic terrorists.

    23. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by mrchaotica · · Score: 1

      That's a bad way to evaluate the false positive rate because it assumes the distribution of terrorist names is the same as the distribution of names in Social Security. In reality there aren't many Muslims in the US...

      Which isn't particularly relevant, since terrorists operating in the US are statistically most likely to be white US citizens with "American-sounding" names.

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    24. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by stdarg · · Score: 1

      The Greater Toronto Area is nearly 8% muslims. If a planes destination is somewhere predominantly muslim, its pretty easy to be on a plane where they're the overwhelming majority.

      And that plane will rightfully have greater scrutiny than others.

      They aren't exactly "rare", and they're virtually all perfectly regular people.

      Haven't you seen the polls in the last decade about how many "perfectly regular" Muslims actually support or sympathize with terrorists? Sure, virtually all Muslims are not terrorists. But with limited resources to investigate and stop terrorists, it makes sense to concentrate on populations where they're likely to have connections. That's why the FBI and police forces are infiltrating mosques... not because "all Muslims must be terrorists" but because the one-in-a-million Muslim terrorist in Toronto is probably going to one of a handful of mosques that the police know about with radical clerics and frequent trips and communications with foreign Muslim groups. And around that one-in-a-million terrorist, there's a network of 100 people who know him and pretty much support what he's doing even though they wouldn't do it themselves, and many of them are undoubtedly at the more radical mosques as well.

      So if 3 of those guys gets on the same plane with a 4th guy who is not even on the radar but looks really radical, maybe we should check them all out thoroughly. Who cares if they're inconvenienced?

    25. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by stdarg · · Score: 1

      If you are the security guard at a Pfizer animal testing facility, you probably wouldn't look twice at the 2 Muslim guys who recently got hired, but the hippy-looking chick with the angry boyfriend? Yeah you're following them on the security cameras.

      Profiling. It makes sense. It actually makes more sense the more specific the target you're looking for. Your error is lumping all terrorists in as one group, which is silly. The terrorists who attack tax buildings are completely different from the terrorists who want complete independence for Puerto Rico and still different from the terrorists who want to impose sharia law everywhere... etc.

      Each of those groups is easy to profile. Lumping them all together serves no purpose except to cloud the issue. Are you doing that on purpose?

    26. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by vux984 · · Score: 1

      Haven't you seen the polls in the last decade about how many "perfectly regular" Muslims actually support or sympathize with terrorists?

      You do realize the "terrorists" aren't some sort of "cartoon" villain right? They have pretty damned good reasons to be upset. Even I have sympathy for them.

      What exactly do you think a 15-25 year old from Afghanistan has for a world view. Think about it. A 20 year old was FIVE years old when 9/11 took place. So for pretty much his entire living memory the US has been directly at war with them, killing their families, and friends.

      How can one NOT have sympathy / empathy for their situation? If a foreign country had turned your homeland into a warzone for your entire life... you'd have to be willfully blind not to see where they were coming from.

    27. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by stdarg · · Score: 1

      They have pretty damned good reasons to be upset. Even I have sympathy for them.

      The problem with that logic is everybody has pretty damned good reasons to be upset. If you have sympathy for Muslim terrorists then surely you sympathize with people who commit hate crimes against Muslims. After all, think of their world-view, wherein for their whole lives they've seen acts of terrorism against their countries in the name of the Muslim religion.

      What exactly do you think a 15-25 year old from Afghanistan has for a world view.

      The 15-25 year old Muslims living in 3rd world countries like you're talking about don't have the means or motivation to attack the West. Many of these 3rd world terrorists are bought and paid for as young children and brainwashed to be used as weapons. If you want to read something heart wrenching, look into the stories of the Mumbai attackers from a few years ago. These guys, who genuinely deserve pity (though they still need to be put down.. they are thoroughly broken and cannot be fixed), are not well liked by Muslims unless they carry out their attacks on non-Muslim targets (e.g. India, Kashmir, Southern Nigeria, etc). There is very little support among Muslims for terrorists attacking other Muslims. They are not at all the same as the terrorists in the polls I mentioned, which were about Muslim terrorists attacking the West. I guess you have not heard about these polls.

      The Western Muslim terrorists are pretty much the opposite of what you appear to think. They are often university students or graduates. They often have engineering degrees. They often come from wealth and well-connected families.

      Do you honestly have sympathy/empathy for, say, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the Underwear Bomber), who was the son of the "former Chairman of First Bank of Nigeria and former Nigerian Federal Commissioner for Economic Development" described as "one of the richest men in Africa" ? What is it about his situation that evokes sympathy in you?

      Or more to the point of the article, look at the Tsarnaev brothers. They came here as refugees and were welcomed, given a new life. The younger brother was a student in a US university. He was a citizen. The older brother married an American girl who converted to Islam on his behalf.

      I mean... you must be insane to think these guys were somehow forced into terrorism by the unfairness of the world. They were given opportunities on a silver platter. Even their own uncle called them losers and said they brought shame to their family and community. But YOU have sympathy for them? Why?

    28. Re:Helpful links for intelligence community devs by vux984 · · Score: 1

      Do you honestly have sympathy/empathy for, say, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the Underwear Bomber), [...]

      Or more to the point of the article, look at the Tsarnaev brothers.

      I don't have much sympathy for their actions, but then I view those particulars as regular criminals, not political regimes the country needs to be at 'war' with.

      (wars which, if anything, just serve to provoke individuals who would be predisposed to doing something crazy.)

      The problem with that logic is everybody has pretty damned good reasons to be upset. If you have sympathy for Muslim terrorists then surely you sympathize with people who commit hate crimes against Muslims. After all, think of their world-view, wherein for their whole lives they've seen acts of terrorism against their countries in the name of the Muslim religion.

      Give me a break. "Their whole lives?" What are you on about? They've seen 1 or 2 isolated events mostly perpetrated by disturbed individuals.

      Its ridiculous to conflate that to someone raised and living in Afghanistan for the last 20 years living in actual war zones where wars were being prosecuted by actual armies.

  8. Horseshit by Tailhook · · Score: 1, Troll

    They would have "missed" Tsarnaev if he had a siren and a pink neon "TERRORIST" sign bolted to his forehead. Re: Nidal Hasan.

    They only miss things they aren't interested in finding.

    --
    Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    1. Re:Horseshit by cbhacking · · Score: 1

      Hyperbole aside, this is arguably a valid point: the TSA can't do their job even when their target is in multiple warning databases. They are worthless, a drain on public funds and American lifetimes. They do far more harm than good... in fact, so far as I can tell they do no good at all. They have changed their policies reactively to several terrorists who made it past them, but they have yet to actually catch one!

      One can say the same thing about the surveillance state, of course. They *might* be doing better on catching people, but again it's a huge drain on public funds (never mind the blight on notional principles) for unjustifiably low benefit.

      People die. It's a fact of life. If you want to reduce the risk of people dying, put that money into cancer research and automotive safety and stuff like that. It will pay far higher dividends.

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
  9. Significance? by mwehle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the tacit implication here is that if Tsarnaev had been questioned on exiting the country the Boston Marathon bombing might have been averted, but is there really any substance to this? Do we think he would have changed plans had he been questioned? Pressure cooker outlets would have been alerted to refuse to sell him cookware? What exactly would the outcome likely have been had he been questioned?

    --
    Wir sind geboren, um frei zu sein - Rio Reiser
    1. Re:Significance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We need to know how many people are reported to the US by Russia and how many people are on these lists. Perhaps the lists have grown so large that they became ineffective, then some unvalidated coding scheme was instituted that just ended up creating more false positives and room for error.

    2. Re:Significance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The elder brother was actually investigated and interviewed by the FBI.

      "The FBI said that it interviewed him and relatives of his, but did not find any terrorist activity, and that it provided the results in the summer of 2011.[76] At that point, the FBI asked the FSB for more information, but the Russians did not respond to the American request, and the FBI officially closed the case.[78]"

      Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_and_Tamerlan_Tsarnaev#2011

      The FBI also interviewed some other people in his circle. And the gov't can't restrict your travel without probably cause and, ultimately, some sort of judicial determination. It's called Due Process--i.e. gov't officials can't just decide to fsck-you over, not at least without a nod from a court. These are pretty significant barriers.

      But, you know, don't let the facts get in the way of your hypotheticals.

    3. Re:Significance? by AHuxley · · Score: 0

      As I said AC "The fact the US gov did not seem very interested"

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    4. Re:Significance? by russotto · · Score: 1

      The FBI also interviewed some other people in his circle. And the gov't can't restrict your travel without probably cause and, ultimately, some sort of judicial determination. It's called Due Process--i.e. gov't officials can't just decide to fsck-you over, not at least without a nod from a court.

      Apparently you haven't heard of the no-fly list, where they just say "Sorry, no boarding for you, go home, kthxbai".

    5. Re:Significance? by DerekLyons · · Score: 1

      This is more about finding reasons to excoriate the TSA, or the Obama administration or whoever your target of choice is than it is about possible outcomes.

    6. Re: Significance? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1) the no-fly list just means you get hassled. I've known a couple people with names on the list.

      2) the no-fly list is illegal. At least in its current form where you can't challenge it.

    7. Re:Significance? by kegon · · Score: 1

      I think that it's a little bit late to come out with the "we almost caught him, we were so close" story.

      The TSA doesn't work. If they were more focused on quality of information than groping and assuming everyone is a terrorist, then maybe, maybe they could have caught him.

      How many TSA agents were working in Boston around the time of the bombing; how many checkpoints did they pass, how many innocent people were inconvenienced and they still didn't catch the brothers until after the event and a long drawn out chase and firefight. They even cornered the surviving brother in a small boat, injured and then had to shoot him upteen times in order to capture him.

    8. Re:Significance? by bickerdyke · · Score: 1

      The fact the Russians had him on their lists shows *something*.

      It shows that Russians have list of names similar to the US "No fly" list, too.

      Considering that senators and lots of other innocent people ended up on those no fly lists tells something about the data quality of such lists.

      The only thing your posts shows is that you're assuming for no reason that Russian Terrorist watchlists are better than US ones. Becuse often enuogh it means jack sh** if you're on such a list.

      --
      bickerdyke
    9. Re:Significance? by khallow · · Score: 1

      but is there really any substance to this?

      Sure, spies and crooks have been caught via interviewing. It's far from perfect, but it does work frequently.

      And even if it just temporarily disrupted the bombing plans, that might have been enough of a delay for the police to catch them for other crimes, paricularly, three murders in 2011 in which the two brothers seem to be the primary suspects.

    10. Re: Significance? by russotto · · Score: 1

      The no-fly list means you don't board. There's another list, called the selectee list, which is for hassling people.

      And of course it's blatantly unconstitutional on its face, it violates due process and constitutes attainder. But the constitution is not being respected so it doesn't matter.

  10. transliteration by Heraklit · · Score: 5, Informative

    News at Nine: transliterations of names can be tricky... Some parts of the world use different alphabets...

    1. Re:transliteration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      exactly. why do spelling bees include transliterated words?
      "ta-eye-koo-nn" -> "tycoon"

    2. Re:transliteration by cold+fjord · · Score: 1

      It's a bigger problem than just that. There are multiple systems for mapping various foreign names into English, and many variant spellings. Then there are what you could refer to as a "fully qualified name" that may not map well into the first-middle-last convention in many places in European languages. In some areas the full name could include things like tribe and/or clan, geographic designations, additional honorifics, and other possibilities. The same person could use multiple names depending on what was selected from the full name.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    3. Re:transliteration by Livius · · Score: 1

      It could be worse. Before the printing press, proper names were generally translated, not just transliterated.

    4. Re:transliteration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We've come across a list of the many different English spellings of [Moammar] Gaddafi's name. Because of the difficulty translating Arabic to English, there are several different translations — the Library of Congress lists 72 alternate spellings, and the New York times, Associated Press and Xinhua news sources used 40 additional spellings between 1998 and 2008.

      How Many Different Ways Can You Spell ‘Gaddafi’?

  11. It was not misspelled by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It was not misspelled, it was just transliterated differently. The original name is Cyrillic, and "Tsarnayev" is actually closer to how it is supposed to be pronounced, but "Tsarnaev" is the more usual letter-for-letter transliteration that doesn't distinguish two modes of Russian "e" (it's pronounced as "e" in general, but as "ye" after vowels and at the beginning of words), and is the one that's usually used in passports. I wouldn't be surprised if "Tsarnayev" was how it was spelled in the documents that they've got from Russia, because the person on the other side translated it phonetically...

    Either way, this points at a glaring issue in all those databases. If they require a perfect match, they're going to be very flaky for all kinds of foreign names - ironically, Arabic ones especially, which I assume are the most commonly searched ones. Remember that whole Qaddafi vs Gaddafi vs Kaddafi in US press when Libya was on the front pages?

    Yet another evidence that all this stuff is little more but security theater. It doesn't matter whether it actually works, so long as people are convinced that it does. Unfortunately, they actually let a real terrorist through this time...

    1. Re:It was not misspelled by manicb · · Score: 5, Funny

      If only there were some kind of universal character set that included all these scripts

    2. Re:It was not misspelled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Those sneaky bastards with their ambiguous names ....

    3. Re:It was not misspelled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right. Because we can totally trust TSA agents to enter UTF-8 correctly after they've completely mastered the Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan, Japanese, [ . . . ] orthographic systems.

    4. Re:It was not misspelled by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2

      I doubt having them type names in their original script would help matters. Cyrillic is easy, but how many DHS agents can input Arabic? Chinese? If anything, I'd suspect that the amount of typos would increase significantly.

      What they need to do is proper phonetic match, tailored to the specific language in question (i.e. if it's an English name, use soundex or something along those lines, if it's Russian, use the Russian equivalent etc).

      Of course, what they really need is to just drop all this bullshit and start paying less attention to names and more attention to people. Gee, guys who moved from a region with a separatist underground movement that quickly evolved into hardline Islamist organization? And they emigrated citing support for said separatist movement? Maybe you should keep an eye on them, just in case. Like, so that if the kids start posting videos with "allahu akbar" beheadings on their public YouTube channel, you'd notice and figure that maybe there's something going on there...

    5. Re:It was not misspelled by jd2112 · · Score: 1

      I doubt having them type names in their original script would help matters. Cyrillic is easy, but how many DHS agents can input Arabic? Chinese?

      English?

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
    6. Re:It was not misspelled by AHuxley · · Score: 4, Informative

      Russian names should not be an issue for the USA in ~2000~2014. They have spent vast sums educating their mil and gov during the cold war and have had US digital database experts since the 1960's...
      The US is not some loser nation with massive budget restrictions upgrading from paper files to imported super computers in the 1970's.
      The US is not some loser nation with massive budget restrictions trying to find staff with language skills in the 1950's.
      This is not Korea or Vietnam in the 1950-60's where the US gov did have to play catch up.
      The USA did great work tracking the KGB/GRU and others within the USA for many decades and that took spelling skills and complex shared database work.
      The USA did great work tracking the KGB/GRU staff changes... and that took spelling and database work too.
      If the USA is having issues with Russian names in a US gov database after 2000++ - someone has ensured a name is protected/free to travel.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    7. Re:It was not misspelled by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Passports are usually scanned to prevent human "type names" issues.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    8. Re:It was not misspelled by Charliemopps · · Score: 1

      I doubt it was an accident either. Remember movie stores? If I got a big enough late fee I'd just go back to the store and use my given name instead of my nick name to get a new card. Charles or Charlie, John or Johnathan, etc... Worked every time.

    9. Re:It was not misspelled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's spelled with an H and two Ds and isn't a seven-letter word for anything. Who am I? I'm just an ordinary citizen who relies on the Times crossword puzzle for stimulation. I'm telling you I've met the man twice, and I recommended a pre-emptive exoset missile strike against his Air Force, so I think I know how to...

    10. Re:It was not misspelled by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Yes, you have a point there. I suppose there's no reason why they shouldn't have the name in original script alongside the English transliteration, at least, and check matches for both.

      Do current passports encode the native script in machine-readable format, though?

    11. Re:It was not misspelled by Ichijo · · Score: 1

      This is about transliterating to Latin. What's needed is to transliterate each name all possible ways and store all the transliterations in the database as alternate spellings for the same name.

      --
      Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
    12. Re:It was not misspelled by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      C'mon seriously that excuse is just total bullshit. It is the same as claiming they could not arrest John Smith because they could not identify him because there are too many John Smiths. This lame excuse is a red flag something decidedly worse going on. Reality check, it works like this, one entry in one data base and no one worries much about you and spelled right or wrong makes not much difference basically to claim such would also mean you didn't bother to add other details like appearance, location, associates etc. When they become concerned about individuals is when there a multiple entries in multiple data bases, hence spelling errors require repetition, which is unrealistic and of course question about the associates would bloody mean who the fuck is this Tsarnayev character living at the same address as Tsarnaev (which would tend to remedy the spelling error thing). It is bullshit to claim they just use your name to identify you, they use everything they can get, name, location(who else lives there and what is their association), appearance (stored images), finger prints (associated crimes), associates (if they lose you they can attempt to recover you via them). So what the fuck is really going on?

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    13. Re:It was not misspelled by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2

      My understanding is that the misspelling did not originate with the guy himself. It's not like he has two passports, when he crosses the border it's his passport that'll be used to identify him, and the name as it is spelled there (and that would normally be "-ev" rather than "-yev"). The screw-up happened where they were compiling the no-go list, and the alternative spelling slipped in somehow - and if I had to guess, they just keyed it in letter by letter from the email or fax that they've got from Russian side, and the guy on Russian side who composed it transliterated the Cyrillic name that he had the best way he could, which was different from the "standard" (for passports) name.

      Even when the change is deliberate, it's not necessarily malicious. I've been in this boat myself, since my family name also ends up with the same suffix, as is common for Russians and other Russian nationals with russified family names. Originally, I consistently used the "-yev" spelling online and in all kinds of formal documents which I had to fill in English, which includes e.g. some of my early IT certificates. When I got my first passport for foreign travels, however, it had the "-ev" spelling per their standard, and I switched everything else to this spelling, as well, to avoid confusion and to be able to easily prove that I am me, should the need arise.

    14. Re:It was not misspelled by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      You assume some degree of competence. I don't think that is justified.

      I mean, we're talking about the country where a top-secret "No Such Agency" intelligence gathering service has just let a rank and file sysadmin walk out with a dump of the entire internal network, including numerous classified and top secret documents, on his USB flash stick, and board a plane to another country under his real name with said stick in his pocket.

    15. Re:It was not misspelled by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... seems to hint at 1980s for the machine-readable format.

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    16. Re:It was not misspelled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Either way, this points at a glaring issue in all those databases. If they require a perfect match, they're going to be very flaky for all kinds of foreign names

      Let me introduce you to this radical new database feature I've been working one... it's called a "foreign key". And -- get this -- it has nothing to do with nationality. It's designed to link pieces of data together, across tables and databases. So, for instance, if you have granted a Visa to a student and you later get an alert about this immigrant, you can look up and link the items together. Your terror watch list will have a foreign key into this other database -- something I call a "source of record" so your data does not get out of sync. These are radically new concepts. If this war on terror thing is at all important, maybe the DoD will fund my research and let me add this to our growing arsenal of amazing terror fighting weapons.

    17. Re:It was not misspelled by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Snowden was flagged by the CIA but then got a contractor job with the NSA... just another database issue?
      http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10...

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    18. Re:It was not misspelled by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      I can totally imagine how everyone and their dog have their own database, and a lot of those databases are not cross-referenced because no-one making these decisions even knows of their existence.

    19. Re:It was not misspelled by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      So, for instance, if you have granted a Visa to a student and you later get an alert about this immigrant, you can look up and link the items together.

      But how do you know that the alert that you have is for that immigrant? Do you think the letter from FSB is going to read, "this guy that you have in the CIA database under ID 12345 is a terrorist"?

    20. Re:It was not misspelled by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      Looks like it's basically ASCII, they have to substitute even German umlauts. Perhaps it's time for an upgrade.

    21. Re:It was not misspelled by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Not cross-referenced might not be the same as flag removed?

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    22. Re:It was not misspelled by Gizzmonic · · Score: 1

      ...and now video stores are all out of business! I hope you're proud of yourself, Mopps!

      --
      (-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
    23. Re:It was not misspelled by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      Well contractor access to top secret data bases just smells to high heaven of plausible denial-ability. Basically under corporate direction the mass media channel that is the United States government was instructed to allow military industrial complex corporations full access to their top secret databases, as a ruse in plausible denial-ability this was provided upon the basis of lax security. The problem with that plausible denial-ability excuse is basically resulted in lax security that could be readily exploited by individuals as well as the corporate executives they represented. So it is all stinking of corruption attempting to masquerade as incompetence.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    24. Re:It was not misspelled by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Most countries would exchange some form of travel document details on people of interest - i.e. kept unique passport data.
      e.g. an image of the passport was found, details sent to the US.
      Passport data is pretty standard and read by computer around the world everyday. Most countries even like to count/have reconciled passports entering, passports leaving.
      A very easy way to find people who overstay or used different documents later or have stolen papers.
      Such systems are decades old and most countries do not make mistakes with that kind of data. For a person of interest to police in the last 10 years ....

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    25. Re:It was not misspelled by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      If the USA is having issues with Russian names in a US gov database after 2000++ - someone has ensured a name is protected/free to travel.

      You might be right, but a simpler explanation is that the people tasked with catching bombers don't actually take their jobs that seriously, and are just phoning it in most of the time. All the technology in the world won't help someone who doesn't know what to do with it.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    26. Re:It was not misspelled by Anubis+IV · · Score: 1

      Thanks to a recent innovation known as "copy/paste", we don't have to trust them to pick the correct characters. After all, it's not like someone was verbally reciting the name to a government employee who was responsible for entering it in the database. They had it in their correspondence from Russia. Why were they relying on a single transliteration that would only work if the spelling was an exact match, when they could have simply used his actual written name as a canonical ID without having to re-type anything at all?

    27. Re:It was not misspelled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He was a movie pirate before it was in.

    28. Re:It was not misspelled by bickerdyke · · Score: 1

      If you don't expect them to enter Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan or Japanese names correctly, how do you expect they could ever identify a suspect with Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, Thai, Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan or Japanese name?

      --
      bickerdyke
    29. Re:It was not misspelled by Bartles · · Score: 1

      They don't require a perfect match. That's the smokescreen. This is 2014, nothing requires a perfect match these days. The extra "y" is the official story explaining why this bombing was unavoidable and how it couldn't be helped. Some people are choosing to believe that steaming pile of bullshit.

    30. Re:It was not misspelled by Bartles · · Score: 1

      All of this. This misspelled name story is a pile of bullshit. This is 2014. They did not miss him because of a single additional phonetic "y".

    31. Re:It was not misspelled by Bartles · · Score: 1

      Absolutely. Someone made a terrible decision, and this misspelled name story is the smokescreen. This administration has done it before, and they will do it for as long as they can get away with it.

    32. Re:It was not misspelled by chihowa · · Score: 1

      There is a table for consistent transliteration from Western and Cyrillic alphabets. It does seem like a shame that the original script isn't at least stored in the contactless chip, though.

      --
      If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
    33. Re:It was not misspelled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not "names." "Orthographic systems." I.e., can you read the Cyrillic/Georgian/etc characters and know how it's supposed to sound.

  12. soudex? by job0 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    haven't they heard of soundex?

    1. Re:soudex? by Yonkeltron · · Score: 1

      Or the metaphone variants? There exist a whole family of phonetic algorithms designed for just this very purpose.

      --
      Keep the faith, share the code
    2. Re:soudex? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Metaphone 3 at least manages to acknowledge that the rest of the world doesn't speak English.

    3. Re:soudex? by wiredlogic · · Score: 1

      Or Levenshtein distance.

      I knew a Mexican citizen with a green card who would be constantly harassed and held for questioning when entering from Canada because his name was similar but not the same as an alias used by someone on the 10 most wanted list. Apparently their matching algorithm is thrown for a loop by Slavic names.

      --
      I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
    4. Re:soudex? by BlazingATrail · · Score: 1

      Or a passport number? these guys were here on visas they should have all kinds of unique numbers and probably photos assigned to them. Why the fuck are they using manually entered names as the only check? Waves hand slowly in the air and invokes the Force: This is not the John Smith you are looking for. TSA Agents repeat, this is not the John Smith we are looking for.

    5. Re:soudex? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      because it doesn't work very well for Russian/ Chinese/ Vietnamese/ Tagalog/ [add 7000 others here]

    6. Re:soudex? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      even worse for names than soundex

  13. Soundex Algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The soundex algorithm would have helped.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

    1. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Cryacin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Great, so now not only if we are a namesake with a wanted "enemy of the state", but also if our names are soundex or Levenshtein Distance 3 similar, we are going to get detained, cavity searched and otherwise.

      --
      Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    2. Re:Soundex Algorithm by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 2

      if our names are soundex or Levenshtein Distance 3 similar,

      "that's Levenshtein with an ei and Levenshtyne with a y" *

      (*) my son, the terrorist

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    3. Re:Soundex Algorithm by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      How is that not probable cause for a warrant?

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    4. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because not all of us wank to authoritarian police states?

    5. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How is that not probable cause for a warrant?

      Police: Sir, open up, we're here to search your house.
      You: On what grounds?
      Police: On the grounds that your name, Bill McGonigle, bears a striking resemblance to the known terrorist, Bill McGonicle.

      Yeah, that is totally ok. /sarcasm

    6. Re:Soundex Algorithm by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Great, so now not only if we are a namesake with a wanted "enemy of the state", but also if our names are soundex or Levenshtein Distance 3 similar, we are going to get detained, cavity searched and otherwise.

      If the feds aren't completely inept, and there's no reason to believe that they are because things have gone more and more their way over the years, they're using a scoring system of some kind already, and having a similar-sounding name will only increase the score a bit, not automatically flag you for an anal probe.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    7. Re:Soundex Algorithm by davester666 · · Score: 1

      Fine. Present some evidence that the Department of Homeland Security, and that agencies under it's control aren't completely inept.

      I'll wait. I'm sure there is something they haven't completely botched.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    8. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i've been looking hard since your post still nothing will provide an update in the morning...

      *mutters*

      they must have ... something ...

      somewhere they did ri... nope

    9. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      Great, so now not only if we are a namesake with a wanted "enemy of the state"...

      That's "enema of the state" to the TSA.

    10. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The soundex algorithm would have helped.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

      Yep I implemented soundex way back in the early 1980s when I wrote a programme for the Commodore VIC-20. The algorithm actually worked 99.9% of the time and was trivial to code in Commodore PET BASIC.

    11. Re:Soundex Algorithm by RabidReindeer · · Score: 1

      Great, so now not only if we are a namesake with a wanted "enemy of the state", but also if our names are soundex or Levenshtein Distance 3 similar, we are going to get detained, cavity searched and otherwise.

      Trust me. It doesn't matter. I had to work with the OFAC data lists.

      Osama bin Ladin's name was only given Fox-News style: "Usama". The Soundex algorithms we had were for English, not Arabic, where the same letter can be "O", "U", or "W", depending on context and other variables. Therefore an "Osama" bin Ladin would have barely registered above average on the scoring process.

      On the other hand, people with the name Guadalupe Ortiz were constantly being harassed, including one or 2 cases that made the national news.

      Apparently, Guadalupe Ortiz was the name of a Mexican travel agency involved in money laundering and thus had earned a place on the OFAC list. It's also, however, a not uncommon name for ordinary individuals.

      Our system wasn't permitted to distinguish between names of persons, companies, or transport vessels. They were concerned that someone would use the alias of "Ford Prefect", or so I was told.

    12. Re:Soundex Algorithm by kilfarsnar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But Obummer is keeping you safe!!!

      Most people here understand that the issue of the creeping security state is not left or right, Republican or Democrat. The parties have shown us that they are both interested in increasing surveillance and curtailing our rights. Why have you not grasped this yet?

      --
      "What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
    13. Re:Soundex Algorithm by kilfarsnar · · Score: 1

      How is that not probable cause for a warrant?

      How is it?

      --
      "What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
    14. Re:Soundex Algorithm by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Fine. Present some evidence that the Department of Homeland Security, and that agencies under it's control aren't completely inept.

      The ongoing erosion of our rights. What, you thought they were there to do something for you? trololol.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    15. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because I love to rile people up by attacking their sacred cows.

    16. Re:Soundex Algorithm by JudgeFurious · · Score: 1

      I can't figure out why that isn't obvious to everyone. I've even seen it rendered into an "easy to forward to all your paranoid friends on facebook" picture captioned "When a boot is on your throat it doesn't matter if it's the left one or the right one" and still there are people so wrapped up in their side being the correct one that they can't see past "Obama" or "Fox News". This is bigger than both parties.

      --
      Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
    17. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He probably has, but still feels that having "his" preferred people in charge of things will benefit him and that's more important to him than the "everyone suffers in a surveillance state" concern.

    18. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Vitriol+Angst · · Score: 2

      True that.

      I still note how the Democrats and Republicans are so divisive, but when it came to the "Military Enabling Act" (I forget it's official name) well, the Dems and Reps got together late on a Friday night and passed a bill that could make a person "not a citizen" based upon suspicions of un-American activity.

      We all get swept up in the rancor of the Dog and Pony show, and behind the scenes, Congress can show quick, bi-partisan coordination. If it helps you and me; then it's going to be controversial. If it empowers them and helps their benefactors -- it happens quickly and without a fight.

      --
      >>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
    19. Re:Soundex Algorithm by slapout · · Score: 2

      Indeed. I just tried it with Sql Server:

      Select Soundex('Tsarnaev')

      --returned T265

      Select Soundex('Tsarnayev')

      --returned T265

      --
      Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
    20. Re:Soundex Algorithm by wwphx · · Score: 1

      Well, Soundex has only been around for almost a century, we can't expect government programmers to be up on the latest technology. Even though every major relational database supports it. Even though most programming languages implement it. Even though you could write your own implementation without too much difficulty.

      --
      When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
    21. Re:Soundex Algorithm by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      How is that not probable cause for a warrant?

      Heaven help us when somebody named "John Smith" blows up a bus.

    22. Re:Soundex Algorithm by sjames · · Score: 1

      Actually, I haven't seen much evidence of their effectiveness. They cause a lot of people a little trouble and a few people a lot of trouble, but every time a real terrorist has come up, they've choked.

  14. I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by quietwalker · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've written about this before; I used to write financial software for a living, and one of the requirements for a US bank was to provide a mechanism to detect transactions by an unauthorized person.

    In short, the govt. provides a list of bad people in a text file. One name per line, all upper case, like it came out of an old batch system. We then check to see if the sender or receiver of any transaction /EXACTLY/ matches that string, case insensitive. If it's an exact letter-for-letter match, there's a flag that's set and the transaction is delayed, but it appears to go through as normal(*). What happens after that is the bank's responsibility, but that's the whole of the complexity.

    Whoever made the list usually has a few variants of spelling; OSAMA BIN LADEN or OMASA BIN LADEN or OSMA BIN LADEN, for example. But that's it. Just spelling your name slightly differently is enough to avoid the flag. We're literally not allowed to add anything else, like soundex matching or handling foreign letters.

    This is ~probably~ also how the TSA no fly list works, and why you still hear about false positives from time to time. It's also probably how any security works until it's been around for 20 years and they hire a contracting company to make them really good software that does what they want, instead of what they think they want it to do.

    It just takes a very long time for software designed by a legislative committee with no technical awareness to morph into something usable, but that's government for you.

    * - most transactions are not sent out until the end-of-day reconciliation anyway, so it looks like it's accepted like most other transactions, probably in a 'pending' state in your online balance - unless you're paying for a wire transfer or something.

    1. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      So what happens when someone named John or Jane Smith gets on the list? Do suddenly thousands of people who happen to have the same name get their transactions delayed too?

    2. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by quietwalker · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes.

      It's no longer making the news, but for a while it was a nearly-daily occurrence. It's just not a big media draw anymore, unless it impacts a politician or famous entertainer.

    3. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by jrumney · · Score: 1

      It's also probably how any security works until it's been around for 20 years and they hire a contracting company to make them really good software that does what they want, instead of what they think they want it to do.

      You really don't understand the companies that are awarded government contracts, do you? Figuring out what the customer really wants is not part of their job description, and is most likely grounds for being put on the first plane back to India. You give the customer exactly what they ask for, no more, with screeds of documentation signed and countersigned in triplicate to cover your ass. When the customer asks for a database that matches names, the names must match, in the official character set of the nation - ASCII, not any other character set, and no mention was made in the customer requirements of accounting for alternate transliterations, so don't try to bring it to the table.

    4. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by viperidaenz · · Score: 1
    5. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      Sounds like a good idea for terrorists.
      Step 1
      Have your group of terrorists change their names to John Doe and other common names.
      Get them on the watch lists
      Laugh at the hoards of innocent people getting extra rub downs by TSA.
      Send your second group through while TSA doesn't have the resources to check everyone who matches the list.

      Step 2
      Have your next group change their names to politicians and famous people...

    6. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by blackraven14250 · · Score: 1

      Using Soundex on something like the terrorist watch list would undoubtedly increase the false positive rate, even though it would solve the true positive problem laid out by the summary. We need something that doesn't create far more problems (you know, like expanding the invasion of rights) than it solves.

    7. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by MisterSquid · · Score: 1
      • John Fledgling
      • John Ya Ya
      • John Parrot
      • John Bigboote (BIG-BOO-TAY! TAY! TAY!)
      • John Nolan
      • John O'Connor
      • John Mud Head
      • John Smallberries
      • John Many Jars
      • John Littlejohn
      • John Starbird
      • John Lee
      • John Whorfin
      • etc.
      --
      blog
    8. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by stdarg · · Score: 1

      I know you're just being funny, but terrorists don't have a goal of inconveniencing people, or interpreted loosely, throwing wrenches in the system. They are proud of who they are, what their ideology is, and they want to fight battles and win and be remembered for it.

      The more hardcore the name, the cooler. Remember "Johnny Taliban?" Aka John Walker Lindh. He had a great undercover name. But he wanted to sound more authentic so he became Sulayman al-Faris.

    9. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by stdarg · · Score: 1

      Looser name matching would increase false positives, but profiling would probably balance that out. Of course that would entail further invasion of privacy etc. If the authorities do it correctly, it would be pretty minor though. You have nothing to fear unless you start going to a mosque, etc.

    10. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      But throwing wrenches in the system can poke holes in it, allowing easier passage for them.

    11. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by dave420 · · Score: 1

      Pretty minor like flagging every single Muslim? I hope I just got wooshed, or you are a terrible human being.

    12. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by stdarg · · Score: 1

      Well, if your name phonetically matches a known Muslim terrorist and you are a Muslim, then you need to be pretty heavily scrutinized whenever you travel.

      If your name phonetically matches a known Muslim terrorist, but you are a 70 year old Mexican grandma, then you do not need to be heavily scrutinized whenever you travel.

      That's how profiling helps. We know more about terrorists than their name -- we know physical and cultural characteristics. If we have that extra information about passengers as well, then it can be used to dramatically reduce false positives.

    13. Re:I wrote anti-terrorist software for banks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It *does* come out of an old batch system.

  15. Re:More lies from the Republicans by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 1, Informative

    "on his way to terrorist training"

    Bullshit! I can't believe the Republicans are still sticking to that lie to try to scare the general public. That is a complete and utter lie. Besides the ones the CIA runs, there are no terrorist training camps. They're trying, and failing(!), to try to convince us that terrorists are a problem when the Republicans are the problem.

    You are trying to be funny, right?

    I know that to most of you, Republicans are responsible for everything from circles-that-can't-be-squared to bad breath, but really, I assure you that they didn't invent Muslim nutso bombers.

  16. well well by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    well well.. a spelling mistake in the end, a shame, the US cannot put a name correctly in a database.

  17. BULLSHIT - COVER STORY by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

    They never tell you the truth. All assertion, no evidence.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:BULLSHIT - COVER STORY by noh8rz10 · · Score: 2

      Buttle, meet Tuttle. I can't believe this hasn't come up yet on this thread.

    2. Re:BULLSHIT - COVER STORY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah it hasn't, unless you count that one post four hours before yours...

    3. Re:BULLSHIT - COVER STORY by JRV31 · · Score: 1

      Sometimes they tell the truth; when it is in their best interest.

    4. Re:BULLSHIT - COVER STORY by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2

      Sometimes they tell the truth; when it is in their best interest.

      Limited Hangout:

      "A 'limited hangout' is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering - some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

      -- Victor Marchetti (August 14, 1978) The Spotlight

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
  18. Never blame a person in the bureaucracy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Baloney. The first rule of government bureaucracy is to blame your resources when you fail. The second rule is to demand more money to fix the problem.

  19. Toilet time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is the last bastion of American freedom, but fear not, they have set aside 30 billion dollars and will be sending S.W.A.T. to every home to verify.

  20. The possibility of such snafus is preferable to th by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    After 9/11, the dragnets were so broad and reckless that people whose names even resembled those of suspected terrorists ended up being dragged out in the night, held indefinitely, sometimes tortured, and in best-case scenarios "merely" put on no-fly lists and blacklisted from employment. Better to accept the possibility of an attack and remain a free country than accept that kind of disgrace.

  21. WTF? What are they using excel spreadsheets? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why would they have to *enter* the name twice, just click the identity, tag it and link to detention... sheesh...

    who designed their app?? The folks who fucked up the obamacare websites? uhhhh ohhhh - looks like it was...

  22. Sure he did.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ..sure they did..

  23. Not just misspelled, but misspelled *differently* by Max+Threshold · · Score: 4, Informative

    Neither "Tsarnaev" nor "Tsarnayev" is the correct spelling; the correct spelling is "ЦÐÑнÐÌÐÐ".

    As another commenter mentioned, utility companies solved this problem decades ago with technology like Soundex. Our intelligence apparatus is apparently crippled by incompetence, laziness, haste, provincialism, or all of the above.

  24. Spell That by puddingebola · · Score: 2

    Tamerlan Tsarnaev- T-I-M-T-H-O-M-A-S. I am professional hockey player.

  25. His name was diabolical! by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Funny

    That fiend had changed his name to "Tsarnayev'); DROP TABLE Terrorists; --"

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:His name was diabolical! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I don't think these software systems are that advanced. Probably something as simple as "Tsarnay\\nev" would be better.

    2. Re:His name was diabolical! by binarylarry · · Score: 1

      Hey I knew that guy in college! Little Tommy Bin Laden we called him...

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  26. Get rid of the TSA! by colin_faber · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seriously, this entire organization encompasses everything wrong with the Federal government. Massive privacy overreach, complete incompetence, and a literal NIGHTMARE BUREAUCRACY! This is one of the worst aspects of the Bush legacy, and "The One" has not done anything to curtail its power: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TRAVEL...

    1. Re:Get rid of the TSA! by ShaunC · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's also an enormous jobs program, employing 50,000 nut-cuppers and breast-gropers alone, without even getting started on air marshals, behavioral analysts, and of course thousands more management positions. Don't expect TSA disappear anytime soon, no matter who's in the White House.

      --
      Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
    2. Re:Get rid of the TSA! by Sir+Holo · · Score: 2

      Mod parent up.

      TSA was created not only a gigantic practical-joke on the middle class. It was also created as a means to mask growing unemployment. All for political points.

      "Fiscal responsibility" indeed.

  27. Shoulda used Google by LoRdTAW · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Agent: Tamerlan Tsarnev

    Google: Did you mean: Tamerlan Tsarnaev

    That would have solved the problem.

    1. Re:Shoulda used Google by TCM · · Score: 2

      Genius!

      Just use a current search engine but with a future database and actch all terrorists! Why didn't anyone think of that?!

      --
      Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
    2. Re:Shoulda used Google by dave420 · · Score: 2

      Find a time machine, go back to *before* the attacks, and try that again.

  28. Re:More lies from the Republicans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Exactly. This is clearly all Bush's fault. Glorious Leader Obamessiah never does any wrong.

    Yes, actually you could argue it's Bush's fault, and the GOP's fault.
    You see, they were too busy crying about Clinton's jizz on a Blue Dress to pay attention to some guy named "Bin Laden" who was blowing up embassies. They got so pissed at Clinton for launching cruise missiles at training camps that after he left office, Bush completely halted all operations against his network. Then they proceeded to ignore multiple public warnings and threats, and after the first airplane hit the tower Bush felt it was more important to finish reading "My Pet Goat" to some kids than it was to immediately ground all commercial air traffic in the region.

    For the record, I'm a Conservative. But I'm not an idiot, either, and can do more than puke up "clever" insults I heard on Rush's nutjob radio show.

  29. new meme....deliberate misspelling by turkeydance · · Score: 2

    john or jhon or joohn....... every one gets a different one.

  30. Soundex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I said Sowndaex

  31. difficulties with names by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This topic has been covered before...
    http://slashdot.org/story/137228

  32. No, no . . . Archibald Buttle by Idou · · Score: 4, Funny

    It should have been: Archibald Tuttle

    --
    Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
    1. Re:No, no . . . Archibald Buttle by MaksimS · · Score: 1

      Did you mean Buttle?

  33. As much as the TSA sucks... by Patent+Lover · · Score: 2

    ... this had nothing to do with the TSA. They just make sure people bring bombs, snow globes, or nail clippers onto planes. Even if they detained the correctly spelled Tsarnaev, he did nothing illegal until he built and set off a bomb. Some day the DHS will realize that they have to do real police work instead of making lists that depend on correctly spelled names.

  34. Ellis Island Syndrome by swschrad · · Score: 2

    we can require everybody to change their name. but we still end up with Anderson, Andersen, Anderssen, etc.

    --
    if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
    1. Re:Ellis Island Syndrome by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Yes but we don't have Arczhihhnioinodgcbn. You never hear anyone talking about that name......

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Ellis Island Syndrome by mcrbids · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Heck, my Father in law spent most of his childhood writing his name wrong when his parents forgot how they'd spelled it on the birth certificate! He found out about it when he got his driver's license as a teen...

      I mean, if a kid's parents can't be trusted to spell a guy's name right, how do you figure a secretary is going to get it right 100% of the time?

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    3. Re:Ellis Island Syndrome by bickerdyke · · Score: 1

      Doesn't a guy somewhere in Wales go by that name?

      --
      bickerdyke
    4. Re:Ellis Island Syndrome by Buchenskjoll · · Score: 1

      These are patronyms from various Nordic countries. Andersen is Danish or Norwegian. Anderson and Andersson are Swedish. Anderssen is the only example of Ellis Island Syndrome.

      --
      -- Make America hate again!
    5. Re:Ellis Island Syndrome by idontgno · · Score: 1

      No, you're thinking of Raymond Luxury-Yacht (pronounced "'Throatwobbler Mangrove").

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  35. Ah, but rest assured... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The next time they cavity-search your 9-year-old daughter at the airport, or microwave your pregnant wife, they're doing it to protect you from TERRORISTS!

    When they log your license plates, traffic-cam your commute, snoop on your e-mail and phone calls, etc. remember: IT'S FOR YOUR OWN GOOD! #OBEY. Do not object no matter what natural and/or constitutional rights they infringe! Above all, ask no questions! (you might be aiding TERRORISTS if you do).

    It's all Security Theater (TM).

    This EXACTLY like U.S. Border security; The elites want the cheap labor and hope to get the votes of a new permanent poor underclass so they demand no border control (and do not enforce immigration laws) while they pretend to be concerned and show-off border patrol vehicles and weapons, etc and propose bill after bill to "fix" the "broken" existing laws (which are only "Broken" in the sense that they're not being enforced).

    The same elites (in BOTH parties - they work together) who let the entire Bin Laden family fly out of the US immediately post-911 (while US citizens were all grounded) without ANY of the normal investigative interviews ANY American family of a mass-murderer would have been subjected to, orders 70-year-old Catholic nuns to get groped at airports for our safety. The same elites who demand lax security at all the nation's cargo ports (so the billions of dollars of trade packed into massive shipping containers will freely flow and their stock market investments will rise) need to make sure YOU do not carry a quart of Mountain Dew onto a plane (to PROTECT THE NATION!!!). They demand online services provide access to your accounts, demand your banks hand-over your financial records, demand your phone company hand over your phone records, demand your doctor make all your medical records electronic and available to them online ("don't worry, it's all for your own GOOD" they say) ... don't worry, NONE of that information will be used by the IRS or the NSA to blackmail your elected politicians or your judges... but then they claim they just cannot find an actual terrorist even when given his identity long before the attack (oh, they MEANT to stop him, but they just COULDN'T help it! they mis-spelled his name!). They are counting on the public to generally be too stupid to ask questions and push-back before they can get their police state. Elites are always perfectly happy in police states... average people? not so much. Pay no attenttion to any of this. They'll give your food stamps and offer you legalized pot if you'll just look away while they sieze all your most-important rights.

    Move along. Nothing to see here, it's all double-plus good.

  36. Memo: Tscharneyeff determined to attack America by haruchai · · Score: 0

    Oops, must be Bush's fault :-)

    --
    Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  37. Gob'ment! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Git wercha payfer!

  38. Multiple factor ID by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Jane Smyth from 1600 Foo Ave. is not John Smith from 1601 Foo St. One or both of these people might not even exist. If the database just did some simple consistency checks like that as a matter of routine, not only would they detain the right people, they'd gradually "heal" the database. Name, address, telephone, email, maybe a few other things without compromising everybody's security (no SSNs, etc.) and you'd get a much more robust ID.

  39. Re:More lies from the Republicans by stdarg · · Score: 1, Informative

    Excellent point. I don't know why you've been modded as a troll. GP sounds exactly like Newsnight's Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels).. the Hollywood fantasy version of a conservative who is "fed up" with how "real" conservatives have no options because their party has been "hijacked" by nutjobs.

    It is really transparent.

  40. Justifiable Punishment For All TSA Employees by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Add the names of all TSA employees to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment and the Treasury Enforcement Communications System.

    Also, Add Dianne Feinstein and Richard C. Blum to the list. On the list add a note to Feinstein and Blum reading, "Kill on sight."

    Looks like the noose around Feinstein's and Blum's necks is closing fast with the capture of California State Sen. Leland Yee and "25 other defendants, including Raymond Chow, a onetime gang leader with ties to San Francisco’s Chinatown known as “Shrimp Boy,” and Keith Jackson, Yee’s campaign aide."

    Sometimes, death, comes in small packages.

    Ha ha

  41. No by 7-Vodka · · Score: 2

    They missed the Boston bombers because they are spying ON EVERYONE instead of focusing the spying, based on probable cause, on the correct folks.

    --

    Liberty.

    1. Re:No by Sir+Holo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They missed the Boston bombers because they are spying ON EVERYONE instead of focusing the spying, based on probable cause, on the correct folks.

      Well, yes. But, paradoxically, failure earns the spy agencies more funding.

      "If we had been provided with enough resources, we could have caught the bad guys!"

      The solution is to limit (yet again) exactly who they can spy on. These children need to be spanked, not rewarded with ice cream.

    2. Re:No by TCM · · Score: 1

      An inherent property of security theater is that both success and failure lead to increased funding.

      "It worked!" "Great, but we need to prepare for future's technology. Let's expand the system."

      "It didn't work!" "We need to expand the system."

      This madness needs to be stopped.

      --
      Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
    3. Re:No by Vitriol+Angst · · Score: 1

      I called this -- we all probably "called this". The TSA has hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions in their database. They added needles to the search for needles in haystacks and we are surprised the missed one?

      And failure means a bigger budget. The guard falls asleep on the job? He doesn't get fired, they give him a machine gun. I hope he feels refreshed whenever he wakes up. Tell the bad guys to tip-toe because Johnny TSA needs that beauty rest.

      The NSA is too busy gathering data to extort and sell info to industrial espionage being used to preserve the status quo. I'm pretty sure while our military uses drones to swat people like flies, we have never been more vulnerable in terms of security and and more hated as a country.

      There are more assets going after Snowden and Julian Assange than Al Qaeda -- which is an organization that conveniently shows up in countries we want to liberate of resources for a multinational. Or maybe it's our help liberating resources that creates the terrorism. It's such a chicken and egg dilemma.

      --
      >>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
    4. Re:No by Vitriol+Angst · · Score: 1

      When deciding how many Hammers to buy, or Security State looks at the theoretical number of nails, rather than the number of hands that might hold the hammers.

      It could be worse; they could catch on that the world contains screws and bolts.

      The only one who should feel better about this is people selling equipment to the TSA and our enemies who want to do us harm.

      --
      >>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
  42. 1980s fuzzy search called by flyingfsck · · Score: 1

    Until somebody re-invents fuzzy search, this will remain a problem for transliterations between Roman and Russian alphabets.

    --
    Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
    1. Re:1980s fuzzy search called by LeadSongDog · · Score: 1

      a problem for transliterations

      Nah, there's no exemption for roman alphabet spelling, they get that wrong too. Not long ago there was a US Secretary of State with a French name "Boucher" didn't get pronounced "booshay", but "bowtshur". This guy must have had the whole of the corps diplomatique giggling inside.

      --
      Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
  43. Re:Not just misspelled, but misspelled *differentl by Nemyst · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Good point highlighting how Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode in 2014 by the way...

  44. Re:More lies from the Republicans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I know that to most of you, Republicans are responsible for everything from circles-that-can't-be-squared to bad breath, but really, I assure you that they didn't invent Muslim nutso bombers.

    You gotta love this rewrite of history. Let's go back to when the Soviet Union was invading Afghanistan shall we...

    It was Saint Ronald Reagan in office who proclaimed those very same people who later did the attacks as "freedom fighters" worthy of illegally diverting funds for arms (look up Iran-Contra Scandal). Every republican loves to trot out that old red herring "Since 9/11 we haven't been attacked again." completely ignoring who was in power on 9/11, the anthrax attacks and the sniper attacks at the time. If the TSA was truly effective, then the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber and yes, even the 9/11 attackers themselves wouldn't have made their way onto those planes to begin with since everyone of them were supposedly on watch lists...

    The TSA is, and always has been, nothing more than security theater. It is 100% reactionary to threats that either were successful or attempted. Someone tries to put explosives in their shoes, we all have to have our shoes off. Someone tries to get explosives in their underpants, we all have to go through invasive searches of our private parts. Someone uses a sharp object to cut the throats of flight personnel, they take away nail clippers because they can be sharp. It is rumored that explosives can be in liquid form so they ban all liquids, even unopened bottled water.

    I will agree with you on one point though, it was a FULL Congress that passed the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Act. It was the FULL Congress that renewed it too. So in that regard it was both parties that enabled this shit.

  45. They got my name wrong too by rs79 · · Score: 1

    I have a US "Green Card". I had to fill out about 27 forms and the last three required me to print my name in block letters, one letter per square. Being British I have of course impeccable printing.

    All the correspondence had my name spelled correctly but when I got the card - my name was spelled incorrectly.

    "It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for" - Will Rogers.

    --
    Need Mercedes parts ?
  46. another staged event.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrUixFDW3Ws
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orxbrfRbbEU

  47. Brace yourself by mr100percent · · Score: 1

    Oh great, now the government will overcompensate by making the search logic even fuzzier, generating far more false positives. Is your name one letter off from someone on the No-Fly list? You're not going to be allowed to fly either. It was bad enough when the TSA was grounding flights when 8-month-olds matched the name of a terrorist, now you're going to have way more of that.

    Don't believe me? After the Underwear Bomber was caught in 2009, Homeland Security decided to prevent it from happening again, by drastically increasing the No-Fly lists and broadening it to encompass flights to Canada and Mexico.

  48. FROM THE MEMORY HOLE by Rugmeister · · Score: 1

    FBI Interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev 2 Years Ago http://boston.cbslocal.com/201... BOSTON (CBS) – Slain Boston Marathon bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev had spoken to investigators prior to Monday’s bombing and subsequent manhunt. CBS News correspondent Bob Orr first reported, the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother of Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, in 2011 at the request of a foreign government to see if he had any extremist ties, but failed to find any incriminating information. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested Friday night after a violent manhunt in Greater Boston. The Tsarnaev brothers were legal residents of the United States. CBS News correspondent John Miller reports Tamerlan Tsarnaev was likely questioned because of suspected ties to Chechen extremists. Miller says Tamerlan Tsarnaev had a sit-down interview where they likely asked him questions about contacts and surroundings. CBS News reports although the FBI initially denied contacting Tsarnaev, the brothers’ mother said they had in an interview with Russia Today. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said her son got involved in “religious politics” about five years ago, and never told her he was involved in “jihad.” Tamerlan Tsarnaev died after a violent shoot out and chase with police Thursday night. His brother continued on the run until his capture in the backyard of a Watertown home.

  49. your blind by letherial · · Score: 1

    Sorry buddy, but if you think that Obama is the center of all the problems your not seeing the big picture. It doesnt matter who the president is, the system is setup the way it is and one president will be the same as the other.

    Since congress is landlocked in this crazy congressional drawn district and many of them are only challenged by even crazier people, the real problem is there.

    In the end, this president, the former president and the next few presidents, plus the congress, supreme court and pretty much are entire government will go down as the worse of all time....but i would like to say, your singularly focus on one person means you will do nothing to help stop it because your fantasy land thinks that the president you vote for next time will fix it, but he/she wont..even if by some fucking miracle you get someone who truly wants to change it, you still got 435 idiots in one chamber, 60 idiots in another, then 9 idiots who are looking at them and paving the way for more stupid behavior (supreme court)

    1. Re:your blind by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He is caught in the conservative frame, and your arguments will not reach him because his mindset cannot process them. I'm not saying (s)he is stupid, he just thinks differently. Conservative mindset is all about making sure it survives and gets bigger, and destroy everything that opposes it. Now Obama is the biggest problem they have, and making him the biggest problem of the country is one of their methods of getting power back. Want to know more? Read up on the strict father morale vs the "nurturant parent model", or read George Lakoff Don't think of an elephant about the (really effective and successful) conservative framing effort. For me it was a revalation to see how they work, and what their real goals are. (Posting AC because of mod points)

    2. Re:your blind by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 0

      your blind

      My blind??

      Whatever does the place I hunt ducks from have to do with this?

      you still got 435 idiots in one chamber, 60 idiots in another,

      I don't object to characterizing congresscritters as idiots, but there are 100 idiots in that other chamber.

      Which, along with the rest of your post, makes for a wonderful example of "pot, meet kettle".

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    3. Re: your blind by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nicely said.to bad you must explain that kind of thing.

    4. Re:your blind by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A president has to choose their battles carefully or else lose the people that work for them and become completely ineffective. Look at what happened with Carter. He tried to bring some ethics back to government after scandal after scandal: One term. Obama can certainly be blamed for a lot, but he knows he has to stand up for the people that work for him or else they will stop working for him. It is up to Congress and the rest of society to push back and make Obama do the right thing.

  50. Sigh. by bickerdyke · · Score: 1

    Obviously, still not everyone has read this yet.

    Espescially it seems like we're talking about #1, #9, #30 and #37 and #38, while we're at it.

    --
    bickerdyke
  51. Good news by letherial · · Score: 1

    All terrorist are now required to be named John Smith, if you are a John Smith then you need to change it because only terrorist can be called John Smith.

    See, problem solved NSA style......

    PS, NSA still needs to listen to your phone calls, make sure you are not a John Smith in disguise

  52. Do you believe this crap, Dascombe? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "The father of the Boston bombing suspects claims to Channel 4 News that the FBI telephoned his elder son after the attack, and prior to a fatal shootout that claimed the life of a police officer."

    "the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother of Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, in 2011 at the request of a foreign government to see if he had any extremist ties"

    "Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended a workshop sponsored by the CIA-linked Jamestown Foundation,Izvestia reports today (see English translation here). The Russian newspaper cites documents produced by the Counterintelligence Department Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia confirming that the NGO “Fund of Caucasus” held workshops in the summer of 2012 and Tsarnaev attended."

  53. Mis-spelling is not a mis-spelling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The problem is not a\ mis-spelling, there are many ways of rendering Russian names into Roman script. Both 'Tsarnaev' and 'Tsarnayev' are correct. The problem is relying on exact spellings instead of sound-alikes or approximate string matching.

    Just try looking up Tchaikovsky in any catalogue; you will at least half a dozen different spellings depending on the cataloguer's native language.

  54. Re:Not just misspelled, but misspelled *differentl by Wizel603 · · Score: 1

    Good point highlighting how Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode in 2014 by the way...

    Slashdot BETA doesn't appear to support Unicode either, for that matter.

  55. Even the Travoltified names are different by cjellibebi · · Score: 1

    There's a web-page that can mangle names like what John Travolta did to Idina Menzel by calling her "Adele Dazeem" at the Oscars.

    Tamerlan Tsarnaev comes out as Tristan Thompseen
    Tamerlan Tsarnayev comes out as Tristan Thozomas

  56. Story coincidentally expands powers by Etherwalk · · Score: 1

    Sometimes they tell the truth; when it is in their best interest.

    This. The story may or may not be true, but their willing and demonstrated duplicity in past Congressional reports makes it suspect. Here the story serves their interests by (1) making it seem like it's not really their fault they missed the guy, and (2) making it seem like should grab and harass near-matches and misspellings of peoples' names. It *ALSO* does not say *WHO* misspelled the name when entering it in the database. Because that person should probably be fired.

  57. XKCD by mprindle · · Score: 1

    Obligatory XKCD comic...

    http://xkcd.com/327/

  58. Easy solution. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Oh. *looks closely at name on passport* I see you're from Durkadurkastan. Entry denied. Be on the next available flight out or we'll put you on a flight to the beautiful resort village Gitmo instead."

  59. "whether or not ... exact match" by Culture20 · · Score: 1

    Seems like the misspelling shouldn't have mattered.

  60. Jeff Bauman by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Can anybody tell me why Jeff Bauman was taken in A WHEELCHAIR with both lower legs blown off, rather than an ambulance GOING TO HIM?
    Talk about stupid and gullible. You're all acting as if this wasn't a false flag event. Please explain - why was he WHEELED away from the scene of the 'bombing' to an ambulance, rather than the ambulance going TO HIM AND ALL THE OTHER VICTIMS?

    1. Re:Jeff Bauman by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because the first step in any first aid is "don't endanger yourself needlessly". Bringing the ambulance directly to the bomb site would be reckless because the ambulance could be damaged, preventing further rescue.

    2. Re:Jeff Bauman by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Because the first step in any first aid is "don't endanger yourself needlessly". Bringing the ambulance directly to the bomb site would be reckless because the ambulance could be damaged, preventing further rescue.

      So instead, the responders kept the injured at the bomb site and then wheeled the amputee out, sitting upright in a wheelchair.

  61. The reliance on names is puzzling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is a failure of the database, which should be tolerant of misspellings, particularly of transliterated names from alternate alphabets. However, it also underscores the issue that "name" is a pretty poor means to identify people. Legitimate names may have multiple spellings, different order based on culture, are prone to miscommunication, are mutable (you can legally change it), are variable (if it doesn't fit in the fields on the form, or you have multiple names, you get to choose what part to use), and they are non-unique. It's further complicated by the ability for forge documents, or take advantage of various local rules about identity documentation. There are many people groups in Africa that give names to their kids, then rename them later in a naming ceremony, often with 4-6 names. Any of them will appear on various bits of legal paperwork at some point.

    I'm not saying that it's 100% worthless information, but a name is not a reliable means of identifying an individual, particularly one in a large population. The practice of making name-keyed do-not-fly lists is silly. Ostensibly the list combines name and birth-date, which helps, if that information can be gotten reliably. Even biometric passports can be relatively easily forged today - and screeners are likely to put more faith in them due to the added technology.

  62. Re:More lies from the Republicans by wildstoo · · Score: 1

    So, I guess only people who blindly agree with every policy and excuse every stupid mistake made by every Conservative administration are allowed to call themselves Conservatives?

    No true Scotsman, indeed.

  63. Pretty lame excuse if you ask me. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The government has had software to deal with alternate spellings of names for years. Either it wasn't very good or never put to use.

  64. Re:More lies from the Republicans by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 1

    While most of your post is spot on there is no way for the TSA to have stopped the 911 attacks since it was formed 2 months after that happened.

  65. Harrassing prospective terrorists? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So what was the point of harassing people you suspect of being prospective terrorist recruits and then apparently not monitoring their activities closely enough to stop them from actually carrying out an attack? Stopping this guy from getting on a plane would have just pissed him off even more. He was already allowed to live in this country, but the one thing he loved (boxing) was taken from him because he was not a US citizen. Harassing him further... even making him stay here rather than getting on a plane, seems like it would have been a terrible idea. Let him get on a plane to leave the country... and don't let him come back if you think he is a terrorist.

  66. Not buying any of it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This all presumes that there where actual deaths and actual terrorists, and actual (non-hollywood style) bombs, and that the whole thing was not just a scripted hollywood made-for-tv production in order to set the precident that the millitary can operate domestically and "lock down" an entire city on command. By the way, was interesting they happened to have all that millitary hardware staged right there on-hand...

  67. SOoo... fuzzy matching doesn't happen? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Someone can just change their name by one letter on their passport and get through a checkpont? Really?

  68. That would be "frenemy of the state" I believe . . by sgt_doom · · Score: 1

    Which reminds me of when I was trying to track down the likely parties involved in that missing $8.7 billion in Iraqi oil funds (kept on account at FRBNY, or the New York Fed, the government contractor was JPMorgan Chase, and the funds, although tenuously overseen by the Ex-Im Bank at Baghdad, were really controlled through the Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA---Iraq), ascertained that Timothy Geithner was chair of the NY Fed at that time, while his old college roomie and best-friend-forever, Daniel Zelikow was the managing director at JPMC in charge of that contract, while it took quite some time to deduce that Reuben Jeffery III was the CPA guy, as his name was consistently misspelled in government files, reports and sites (Reuben Jefferies, or Reuben Jeffrey, or Jeffrey Reuben, etc.).

    Timmy Geithner moved on to be Treasury Secretary, while Danile Zelikow is back at Goldman Sachs and Reuben Jeffery III (former Goldman Sachs dood) became CEO at Rockefeller Financial (replacing the previous CEO who died by suicide, of course, quite a few "suicides" surrounding that entire affair, especially the most bizarre "suicide" of Philip Merrill, who was head of Ex-Im Bank at that time in Iraq, and was about to meet with a journalist?

  69. The FBI is lying about every aspect of this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Dark Questions About a Deadly FBI Interrogation in Orlando
          http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/24/dark-questions-about-a-deadly-fbi-interrogation-in-orlando/

    Two Lawmen, Two Stories of a Boston Marathon Witness Killing
        http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/26/two-lawmen-two-stories-of-a-boston-marathon-witness-killing/

  70. of course by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    of course, had we nabbed this guy ahead of time, he'd be a poster child for "government abuse!!11!!" and brought up every time some slashdotter wanted to bolster his kumbaya rainbow pony worldview.

  71. Re:More lies from the Republicans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    you obviously didn't bother to learn more than the media chose to feed you. While the Starr report had maybe 20 pages of salicious details, the other thousand were about shady payoff details to the Chinese government including dual use technologies for campaign cash, as well as lies under oath.

    All the stuff Sandy Berger trousered out of the National Archives, but is still available for anyone with a brain and not into sound bite politics.

    But don't let that stop ya from dodging the issue.

  72. Bullshit - TECS has phonetic matching.... or someo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9XYoVI0fdqsC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=TECS+soundex&source=bl&ots=UlL1vx8oQK&sig=OTf4ty8uc2iLUhYApTAtAqXyu2w&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QHA0U8iyFImthQfn74DYAw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=TECS%20soundex&f=false

  73. Re:More lies from the Republicans by stdarg · · Score: 1

    No you don't have to blindly agree, nor agree to everything. Blaming the GOP for 9/11 is really dumb though. Are you seriously defending that argument?

  74. Re:More lies from the Republicans by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

    The left wing is conservative. The right wing is liberal. The parties have flipped-flopped so many times, it doesn't make sense to use "liberal" or "conservative" to apply to either, as often it depends on the specific issue.

    And nobody needs to try to make the conservatives look bad, they do plenty good of that on their own.

  75. Every time you make a mistake by Jezisheck · · Score: 2

    Every time you make a mistake the errorists wins.

  76. translation error by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The Russian e is pronounced ye. It sounds like a translation problem.

  77. If you stupid Americans and Anglosaxons by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...weren't wasting your resources to snoop on Angela Merkel and to hack Belgacom, this guy would have been caught. You would have worked with FSB to track and nail down the guy before who could do anything wrong.

    But you know what ? Wahabist terror was invented by YOU and YOUR friends. It helps the Military Industrial Complex to have 500 billion dollar+ revenue. So, no real interest to extinguish the fire.

    Rather, you start new ones all the time. Just recently your stone-age Wahabist friends started a new fire in Syria.

    Good Buttfucking, my dear Anglo far-relatives.

    Gruesse

    Tiefer Deutscher Staat

  78. All the fun on Leftist Moneying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "we can let everybody immigrate and make them part of our armed forces and police. Including muslims. Our pinko-liberal books say so."

    FUCK THAT.

    Free Advice from Germany.

  79. Re:More lies from the Republicans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Actually, he made at least one conservative look good, but you're restoring my faith in yammerheads.

    I note that you did not dispute any of the factual points he made, nor did you show how you can avoid reaching the same conclusion.