John McCain's alter ego?

Posted by Christi Parsons at 3 p.m. CST

Is Jawan Meihuizen the alter ego of one John McCain?

Could Brisco O'Finn actually be serving in the U.S. Senate under the name of Barack Obama?

Might Hilaraye Calandan actually be Sen. Hillary Clinton trying to sneak through airport security incognito?

Maybe, according to an analysis released today by S3 Matching Technologies, a software company offering a critique of the methods they say are used to screen for terrorists at American airports.

To make its point, the company used the government's process for checking pseudonyms, and came up with hundreds of possible aliases for every name it entered -- including those of several presidential hopefuls.

To be clear, the government doesn't detail exactly how it screens travelers for matches on the no-fly list. But company officials and others in the industry believe the government uses an obsolete software that removes vowels from names and assigns a numerical value to the remaining consonants, which it then matches against the no-fly list.

The result is hundreds of false positive matches, they say, which makes searching for a real no-fly passenger about as hard as finding a needle in, well, a security screening queue at peak travel time.

In case you're wondering, S3 is a data matching company that merges billing records, addresses, invoices, names, account numbers and other data for large companies.

"This isn't a pitch to sell to the government," said James Moore, director of communications. "Most people don't like to do business with the government. But the point is, the government tends to do this stuff with big contractors who don't have any financial motivation to improve their software."

For the record, the S3 software is called "TeraMatch," which is not a play on the president's pronunciation of "terror." It's a reference to the software's use of data "terabytes."