FBI didn't know Tamerlan went to Russia because airline misspelled his name.

[dkf]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said Monday that the FBI did not know that Tamerlan Tsarnaev — the deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect — went on a six-month overseas trip in 2011 because his name was misspelled.

“He went over to Russia, but apparently when he got on the airplane, they misspelled his name, so it never went into the system that he actually went to Russia,” Graham said on Fox News, saying he spoke to an assistant director of the FBI.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/lindsey-graham-tamerlan-tsarnaev-russia-trip-90416.html#ixzz2RDJxLjC1

[BeyondGeography]

1. So Lindsey's back to praising the FBI now

Probably got himself a nice little talking-to. Jumping to conclusions and all that.

[alcibiades_mystery]

2. Billions of fucking dollars for this

A University affiliated (Newman House) Catholic church I attended one time in college to get to know a girl better has been tracking me down for 20 years, hitting me up for cash. I never even left a name with them that I can remember! They follow me everywhere with mailers.

But the DHS can't keep track of a possible terrorist they've already interviewed once because the airlines spell his name wrong? What is happening when they scan those passports through the machine? Is it like a fake red light cam?

Honestly. Ridiculous.

[Brickbat]

3. Ha, that cracks me up.

Mr. Brickbat still gets mailings from a realtor who got his name of a mailing list because he bought a HUD house. Twenty years and three moves ago. Maybe the government should outsource more work to these kinds of people!

[denverbill]

4. Don't like 30 people at the airport check the ticket against the ID?

What do they just wave you on through if you have a foreign name spelled differently?

[octothorpe]

5. Seems very exploitable if so....

[Gin]

6. Were all of his documents misspelled? This doesnt jive with my experiences.

[reformist2]

7. Where did Lindsey get this info from? Has the FBI confirmed this?

[FarCenter]

8. Dubious

First, any computer searching on a name is going to use a phonetic matching algorithm. A primitive one is Soundex, but the TLAs should be using much better ones. So a misspelling wouldn't necessarily cause a mismatch.

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

Second, travel documents usually have numbers in them that are used as identifiers, e.g. your passport number. Names are generally unreliable as identifiers, since people change them occasionally, can legally use more than one name, can spell them anyway they want (for example, spelling the same name with an ending in son, sen, sson or ssen is perfectly fine).

[woodsprite]

9. My daughter had a friend who went through Europe with a wrong birthdate on her passport

She got it fixed when she came back, but she used that date if she had to write it on anything while she was traveling. I don't know how she got back in the country. I would have thought that would have been where the most chance of a problem would have been.

My daughter just got her passport for travel this summer so we double and triple-checked it.

[dballance]

10. I Guess Lindsey Figured Out He May NEED the FBI Sometime in the Future

What a dumbass. Go ahead and keep insulting the FBI, Lindsey. You won't need them to help you out when someone sends you mail with anthrax, ricin, or a bomb in it. No, you don't need them at all.

[Canuckistanian]

11. So all this endless checking of passports at airports is useless?

Wow, this seems to be a HUGE security problem if the FBI is relying on airline records to track persons of interest.

[dkf]

12. Good point.