The problem with no-fly lists is this:
They'd be great if they were actually a list of *names*. Or great at least in the sense of maybe *working*.
But what they are is a list of *name abbreviations*. How many people do you think will abbreviate to the same thing?
I blogged about this back in June of last year, after reading this article --
No-fly list ensnares innocent travelers
Many airlines rely on name-searching software derived from "Soundex," a 120-year-old indexing system first used in the 1880 U.S. census. It was designed to help census clerks quickly index and retrieve sound-alike surnames with different spellings -- like "Rogers" and "Rodgers" or "Somers" and "Summers" -- that would be scattered in an alphabetical list.
Soundex gives each name a key using its first letter and dropping the vowels and giving number codes to similar-sounding vowels (like "S" and "C"). The system gives the same code, L350, for "Laden" and all similar-sounding names: Lydon, Lawton, and Leedham.
So, you see, all these similar names get dumped into the same bucket, and only one label can be put on the outside of that bucket. Fly, or no-fly.
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