Incident: A name matched as a string
29 min read·14 Oct 2026
Module 3 · Incident file · About 30 minutes
What happened
In August 2004 Senator Edward Kennedy told a hearing of the US Senate that he had been stopped at airport check-in several times that year. The reason, as he described it, was that a name like his was on a security watch list. It took weeks, he said, to have it put right. The case was widely reported at the time.
The point for anyone who builds an extractor is short. A name matched as a string is not a person. The list held a name; the check compared names; nothing asked whether this traveller was the person the list meant, and nothing made it quick to say no.
Lesson 3 of this module built Tidewell's product extractor from a list of names. This file shows the same failure in miniature, made by a change that improved the score.