No-Fly Zone

The problem with the federal watch list is that airlines are searching it for numbers, not names.

Your name is a number.

Chances are, if you've flown on a U.S. commercial airline in the past three years, its employees have compared your name, and those of everyone else on your flight, to a list of at least 20,000 people the government says are a threat to civil aviation, often because they're suspected terrorists. The airlines are looking for a match between their passenger manifests and the government's "no-fly" list, and if they find one, they can bar you from boarding a plane.

As sensitive an operation as this is, many times the airlines base a match not on the spelling of your name, but on a special code that consists of one letter followed by three numbers that describes how your name sounds when it's spoken. Your surname is tagged with one of these codes, and so are other names, possibly hundreds, that are spelled differently but sound something like yours. (Smith and Smyth, for instance, are identically coded.) So, if your code matches one on the no-fly list, even if the name attached to it isn't yours, you may find yourself trying to convince a federal agent that you're not a terrorist.

How often does this happen? According to the Transportation Security Administration, which maintains the no-fly list, at least 1,100 times between Sept. 11, 2001, and November 2004. That's the number of people who have requested "identity verification forms," which are used to help determine whether someone fingered by an airline really is the person on the list. Of course, the total number of people who were flagged as potential terrorists could be much higher, since not everyone who encounters a problem fills out a form.

Catching innocent passengers in a terrorist dragnet is more than an inconvenience; it's an alarm bell. Clark Kent Ervin, the recently departed inspector general of the Homeland Security Department, was so unnerved by the failure to fix problems with the list and other databases of suspected terrorists' names that he accused the department of abandoning one of its basic responsibilities: merging all the government's disparate watch lists. Two years after Homeland Security's creation, it still hasn't fixed one of the biggest problems it was supposed to solve-how to keep terrorists off airplanes.

Sound Off

One potential solution to the problem would be for TSA to take control of the name-matching process. Today, airlines individually search the list, which TSA updates and distributes each day.

Many airlines' name-matching software is based on a simple algorithm called Soundex. Known as a "phonetic index," it was first applied to the 1880 Census to locate names that may have been spelled incorrectly because they sounded alike. A name's Soundex code begins with the first letter of the last name. Then, the name is stripped of vowels, and each remaining consonant is assigned a number from 1 through 6. The letters H, W and Y are disregarded, as are any consonants beyond the third position, because the code must have only three numbers. If there aren't enough consonants, a zero is inserted.

Take the name Holmes. The code starts with H. Throw out the vowels, and assign numbers to the remaining letters. The "L" always receives a 4, the "M" gets a 5 and "S" gets a 2. So the Soundex code for the name Holmes is H-452. Of course, Holmes isn't the only H-452, and here's where the no-fly list breaks down. Holmes sounds a lot like Helms, and not surprisingly, Helms is coded H-452. The same goes for Black and Block, each coded B-422.

This explains why Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., has been barred from boarding some airplanes-somewhere on the no-fly list, there is a K-530, who may or may not be named Kennedy. (It's possible some airlines are also checking Kennedy's first name, which may explain why he has been stopped on some flights, but not on others.)

But look at the problem another way. Some names sound only slightly like their Soundex cousins, especially if they're derived from different languages. Ashcroft, for example, is coded A-226. But so is Achjar, an Indonesian surname. The same snafu occurs with the name Ridge. It's coded R-320. And so is Rataj, a Muslim surname used in Eastern Europe.

"Obviously these things are not very sophisticated," software executive Jack Hermansen says of the search programs. Hermansen's company, Language Analysis Systems Inc. of Herndon, Va., makes NameHunter and NameClassifier, products that recognize names based on full spelling, as well as how they're spelled in different languages. In practical terms, it's an evolutionary leap over Soundex, and TSA uses it for intelligence purposes. But, Hermansen says, the airline industry isn't using the software to search the no-fly list.

Beating the System

TSA appears to be reaching the limits of its patience with the way airlines are using the list. An agency official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, says airlines shouldn't limit themselves to rudimentary techniques to compare passenger names. Under the current system, airline employees simply direct red-flagged passengers to TSA agents at airports, making it the government's problem to sort out the confusion. (Representatives of the Air Transportation Association, the industry's lobbying arm, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

TSA says the government, not the airlines, should vet passenger names. But the airline industry is nervous about sharing private passenger data with the government, because of the uproar over civil liberties concerns that usually attends such transactions. By late 2005, the TSA official says, the agency hopes to launch its Secure Flight program, under which the Terrorist Screening Center, an FBI-led operation that's been working for months to consolidate all terrorist watch lists, would perform passenger name comparisons. TSA's previous attempt to run a passenger profiling system collapsed amid public furor over government access to personal data, so the future of Secure Flight is by no means guaranteed.

In the meantime, some no-fly-nabbed passengers have decided to take matters into their own hands. At the urging of airline employees, some are using their middle initials in order to distinguish themselves in name-matching systems. That approach hasn't worked for all passengers who've tried it, but the TSA official says it's worth a shot: "Any piece of information that would make you stand out from all the other [names on the list] is going to help you."

Of course, if legitimate passengers can foil the system, then so can those who are on the no-fly list for a reason.