“US authorities missed Tsarnaev’s trip because his name was misspelled in the system, possibly on a plane ticket. Napolitano acknowledged ‘there was a mismatch there,’ adding that an immigration reform bill now under consideration would cut down on such problems by requiring passports to be readable electronically. It was not immediately clear whether Tsarnaev’s departure set off a government alert because he was on a terror watchlist or on a broader, central repository of some 500,000 names, known as the TIDE database, maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center.”
