The USA is one of the few countries that has NO (official) exit controls for checking pp's; I assume that when I make a reservation for an intl trip, and I am required to give my pp number to my airline that they have cross-checked it with Interpol(?)--if not "we" are no better (maybe worse) than (say) Malaysia.
PS: I am NOT saying that catching people flying with stolen pp's will have any effect on flying safety; if (as in the case of 9/11) the hijackers were on a suicide mission, why should they care about using stolen pp's?
The US is the biggest user and backer of the SLTD database. Despite our massive surveillance state infrastructure (and partnerships related to that) and massive scrubbing of pax manifests against various databases including the SLTD, people still manage to travel to/from the US on docs that were entered into the SLTD database. MRZ alterations and being only as "strong as the weakest link" are part of this picture.