Would new screening stop underwear bombers?

NY Times:

Airline passengers are now increasingly being patted down, and carry-ons are being double-checked since a self-proclaimed terrorist tried to bring down a passenger jet headed to Detroit on Christmas Day. Canine teams are out in force, sniffing for explosives.

Starting this past weekend, more international flights bound for the United States have had plainclothes air marshals mixed in with passengers. Extra teams of specially trained security officers have been roaming airports looking for tells among the passengers — furtive glances or people who nervously open and close bags repeatedly.

In ways large and small, the Department of Homeland Security, once again, is struggling to strengthen an aviation security system it has already spent $40 billion rebuilding since the terror attacks of 2001.

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For example, the government has yet to fully deploy a sophisticated method of matching passenger names with terrorist watch lists. And it has still not finished changes that would make it harder for terrorists to sneak bombs into airplane cargo holds, according to government reports.

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Non of the new measures would have stopped the underwear bomber. There is some technology that would have discovered the bomb, but Congress opposed implement the kind of intimate body scan tech that would have spotted him.

I do not understand the problem in comparing names with a data base. That should not be that hard, but it is not necessarily effective if the attacker uses a fake name with fake ID. In fact recent rulings by courts in the US have made it harder to prosecute people for identity theft. In their eagerness to protect illegal immigrants these courts have opened the doors to terrorist.