# Apparently the US thinks I'm a bad guy

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/apparently-the-us-thinks-im-a-bad-guy/363628>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [July 8, 2006, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/apparently-the-us-thinks-im-a-bad-guy/363628 "2006-07-08T14:23:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![mks57](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@mks57](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mks57)\
**Post date:** [July 10, 2006, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/apparently-the-us-thinks-im-a-bad-guy/363628/21 "2006-07-10T12:06:10Z")

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[QUOTE=if6was9]

Is every guy named _Al_ having this done? Everyone with an Arab name? Every _Kim_? I can see their point if the name **matched** , but yours is similar so you’re guilty and YOU have to prove otherwise. Is this Soviet Russia?  
[/QUOTE]

The problem is that there is no single way to transliterate names in languages like Arabic and Russian, so asking for an exact match is impractical. Even for English, codes like [Soundex](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex) are commonly used to deal with variant spellings.

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