There’s been a TSA policy of asking passengers to say their name at the ID/boarding pass check for a few months now.
I went through the checkpoint at JFK Terminal 7 tonight, I finally got a taste. The TSO asked every passenger in the elite line to say their name, myself included, prompting me to remind him that it was on both my US passport and boarding pass. Faced with a DYWTFT situation, I said my last name, but he was unhappy with my pronunciation. He wasn’t happy with my first pronunciation so he had me say it again along with my first name.
I asked why and got the response “Don’t you want to be safe? Someone could be using someone else’s ID.” While there’s been some discussion that it’s to catch users of fake IDs who don’t bother to know the name on it, the alternative ID hypothesis is probably similarly implausible. “There’s a lot of dumb criminals,” he went on to say. Rather than invoke the fact that the 9/11 hijackers used their actual names in an airport, I moved forth to receive my grope as Terminal 7 consistently has the backscatters on.