There appear to be a few problems with this article. Having just dealt with mispellings of names as a travel agent, I can say that the airline at the airport are the only people who can fix it in general. Perhaps the issue here was that this was some sort of peculiar bug, but travel agencies (such as Expedia) can't change the name on a ticket (even to correct a typo) without the airline's permission, but the airline can.

Secondly, the reference to SecureFlight is totally wrong. The SecureFlight data is in an entirely different place in the record than the name field and anybody can change it: the airline, the agency, or the passenger themselves. The SecureFlight data is not compared with the ID by TSA because it's not on the boarding pass: when comparison between SecureFlight data and ID is needed, it's done by the airline, not TSA.

As far as routine typos in names are concerned (which is not the case here), most airlines (especially for domestic travel) don't even bother to correct them because nobody cares about them.

I suspect that what happened in this case is that the boarding pass printed in such a wierd way that everybody who looked at it said "what in the world is that?" and nobody was comfortable proceeding until it was understood.