FC: Airline reservation systems use Soundex to snare innocent people

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 22:56:20 -0400
To: declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
From: Duncan Frissell <frissell () panix com>
Subject: Airline Res Systems use Soundex to Compare Names

The SF Chronicle reports that airline res systems use an ancient name 
indexing system that guarantees masses of false positives.

No-fly list ensnares innocent travelers

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/08/MN253740.DTL

"SORTED BY SOUNDS

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."

Soundex is well known these days to genealogical hobbyists.  Here is an 
article laying out the Soundex coding scheme:

http://www.archives.gov/research_room/genealogy/census/soundex.html

"Every soundex code consists of a letter and three numbers, such as W-252. 
The letter is always the first letter of the surname. "

The Soundex code for my last name is F-624.

Here is an automatic Soundex 
calculator:  http://resources.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/soundexconverter

It was a great system when one had to index long lists of names by 
hand.  It was designed to group large sets of names together to reduce 
workload.  It's madness to use it in a modern computer system to check for 
matches with the names of terrorists.

DCF 




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