# Are any commonly-issued forms of ID beyond the counterfeiting abilities of foreign governments/intelligence?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-any-commonly-issued-forms-of-id-beyond-the-counterfeiting-abilities-of-foreign-governments-intelligence/930454>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [January 13, 2021, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-any-commonly-issued-forms-of-id-beyond-the-counterfeiting-abilities-of-foreign-governments-intelligence/930454 "2021-01-13T16:25:04Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![Kimera757](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kimera757/32/3765_2.png) [@Kimera757](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimera757)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2021, 12:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-any-commonly-issued-forms-of-id-beyond-the-counterfeiting-abilities-of-foreign-governments-intelligence/930454/61 "2021-01-28T00:40:03Z")

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I read the spelling was “Khadaffi” and yes, it does not take Arabic script into account. I imagine the same issue arrives with many other languages.

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**Author:** ![Schnitte](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/schnitte/32/9033_2.png) [@Schnitte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Schnitte)\
**Post date:** [January 28, 2021, 9:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-any-commonly-issued-forms-of-id-beyond-the-counterfeiting-abilities-of-foreign-governments-intelligence/930454/62 "2021-01-28T09:56:09Z")

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> [@Melbourne](#):
>
> The passport provides a name, and that name is used wherever you use that passport. In the modern world, your ID has to match your flight tickets.
> 
> The ‘correct’ spelling is a bit of an issue, since the barcode does not encode all scripts. I don’t think it correctly encodes arabic script ??? If not, someone with a name like “Muammar Gaddafi” might have to use the same “incorrect” spelling in other travel documents, particularly when in countries that don’t use arabic script.

My family name has the letter W in it. When I travelled to Russia a couple of years ago and arranged for a visa in advance, the body text of the visa included my name in both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet. The machine-readable segment at the bottom of the visa (and that was the one the Russian immigration officer scans, not the machine-readable line of the passport) can process only the Latin script, but for some reason the consulate that issued the visa did not put my family name in its original Latin script version there, but rather a version that was transliterated back from the transliterated Cyrillic version in the body text of the visa. This to-and-fro transliteration resulted in the W becoming a V, and therefore my name in the machine-readable part of my visa did not match my name in the body text of the visa, in the passport, and the ticket. I was worried that this mismatch would cause problems, but it didn’t, so I suppose immigration agencies the world over have a great deal of experience dealing with such issues that can arise from transliterating names across scripts.

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