As a guy named Chris Smith, I can tell you, people do absolutely "match people on first and last name", and it causes me no end of trouble.

I failed a background check once because they even ignore middle name/initial. The record in the system had a different MI and I provided mine. Also, birthdate, location, race, etc., were all mismatched. Thankfully, in that case, I was able to provide documentation that I was not a match, but it is incredibly frustrating to have false positives and no "this is positive but it is obviously a partially incorrect match. In the OP's hypothetical about a pre-screening background check, you might never get the opportunity to clear your name.

And most systems and forms in the USA only provide for one middle initial, which makes things tricky for those coming from other cultures.

They do unfortunately. I know someone with a more unusual surname who was getting chased for the debt of someone with the same name. It happens.

You’re presenting this like a mistake born out of incompetence.

It isn’t. The institutions involved simply don’t care whether they are destroying the lives of random people. At all.

And why should they? They are completely unaccountable in practice, sometimes even in theory.

I think he’s presenting it as the shortcoming of not caring.

> How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ...

The same Jobs that routinely denied publicly that he was the parent of his daughter, even though he knew? The same Jobs that cheated Wozniak financially? The same Jobs that led to a change in legal legislation on how organ transplants work?

The world needs to move on from this marketing bs that he was somehow a "great" man who is morally solid and must be doing the right thing. Apple is precisely the company founded by Jobs.

TBF, the company of Wozniak would have a way around the App Store restrictions, so it's obviously not that anymore. Probably hasn't been since Sculley.

Being an asshole is a different problem from believing that there is only one John Smith on the planet.

No-fly lists are sort of bonkers in this way.

Firstly you have the issue that many terrorists are going by a nom de guerre rather than their legal or birth name.

Then, of course, your terrorists will have common names. How many Mohammeds are you gonna list?

Lastly is transliteration. Your no-fly list is in Latin characters. But your terrorists have Arabic and Persian and Hindi and Cyrillic names. So what do you do. Transliteration is an inexact science, and there are often many branching methods of doing it.

So no-fly lists are based on fuzzy matching common pseudonyms. It's a farce, really it is.