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

[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).