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Comment by jenny91 | Hacker News Reader

TSA doesn't really give a crap about the name. I always put my preferred name on airline tickets, and nobody ever complains.

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That'll work, until a petty bureaucrat decides to ruin your day.

This is not true. You can apply for a redress number to prevent future exception handling. The TSA and DHS makes this an easy process, I have helped more than one person through it.

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/travel-redress...

https://www.dhs.gov/dhs-trip

Until it's the German bureaucrats that ruin your day.

This is an international issue and a national answer doesn't solve it.

For what it's worth my first name is also not accepted correctly (it contains a hyphen) and I never had a problem so far. But every time an airline asks me to put my name exactly as in the passport I cringe.

By my reading of that first link, you're ineligible for redress until TSA has already ruined your day at least once.

Of course, by my understanding of the word "redress," that was already true; but I did click the link.

That aligns with my understanding with how the redress process works. The facial recognition side is getting better, DHS knew who I was and my return flight details returning from overseas today with only taking my photo. No need to present my passport, as my biometrics are linked to my global entry profile (which has a known traveler number you can provide to airlines when booking). I would expect this to be generally available over the next several years.

The airlines commonly (universally) cram a first and middle name together with no space, and this never seems to matter. I know there's a certain degree to which the info that goes to TSA about who you are isn't exactly a match for what's in the airline's reservation system and what's on your boarding pass... to what extent it's that system at work here vs. the name actually not mattering that much isn't really clear to me.

I was once prevented from advancing through security by a TSA agent due to the first name on my ticket not completely matching my legal first name on my id, even though it was obviously a derivation of my legal name.

The derivation I use of my first name is obvious in some countries and completely unknown in others.

Like how a random Asian security person at an airport might not guess that Dick Wolf is Richard Wolf.

I’m curious how this works with the new ID-scanning machines that no longer require a boarding pass. Maybe there’s some level of fuzzy-matching name/sex/dob?

I assume for TSA Precheck users there’s some lookup that can just grab your KTN from the database from your ID and look up tickets based on that.

Nobody seems to care that I leave my middle name off my tickets and book with a sex doesn't match my ID, even internationally.

True, but Global Entry and Precheck would.

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