20,000 On List -- 10-Percent Say They Shouldn't Be There

About 30 times every day, airlines across America stop and question people whose names are similar to those on the TSA's Do Not Fly List. But, according to an internal TSA memo, none of them was actually a terror suspect.

The TSA's own documents indicate that, before September 11th, 2001, there were only 16 names on the government's Do No Fly lists. Now there are several lists and they contain more than 20,000 names.

The information comes from about 300 pages of documents a federal judge ordered the TSA and the FBI to release in response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU is suing the government on behalf of Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, two peace activists who want to know why their names are on the lists.

The Washington Post reports the lists may be of very limited use anyway. The paper says passengers whose names are flagged on the Do Not Fly lists simply alter their names to get "unflagged." They add a middle initial or change the spelling or add titles to get around the restrictions.

The TSA says it knows there are problems with the no-fly lists. It hopes to correct the vast majority of them with its new program, Secure Flight.

The false positives "underscore the need we have to get more information on passengers to adjudicate those that are not a risk," said Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, as quoted in the Post.

The problems seem to stem from the way the airlines match names against the two major no-fly lists maintained by the TSA. They use technology that dates back to 1918. It's called Soundex and has been used by the Census Bureau to help sort out names that are spelled differently, but sound the same. For instance, the Post reports, the names Kennedy Kemmet, Kenndey, Kent, Kimmet, Kimmett, Kindt and Knott, for example, would be assigned Soundex code K530.

FMI: www.tsa.gov