Important People Are Noticing How Terrible CLEAR Is for Airports

On the Sunday after Thanksgiving, some 2,907,378 flyers passed through TSA security, setting a new record. Much of the media coverage showed meandering security lines snaking their way through airport halls—a sight that’s likely to be repeated during the December holidays. America’s terminals are stuffed.

For impatient travelers, a workaround is available for a price. CLEAR, a publicly traded company, allows its subscribers to bypass the security line at more than 50 U.S. airports. Instead of trudging their way through a standard line for TSA or TSA PreCheck (the federal program that allows security-approved flyers to wear their shoes and keep their laptops stored as they pass through X-rays), CLEAR members are met by a company representative who brings them to a biometric scanner to check their identity, then ushers them straight to the head of the line—ahead of other, often irritated flyers inching their way to the front.

CLEAR, founded in 2010, claims that it provides enhanced identity verification with its biometric scans, but everyone knows why most customers fork over $189 a year. (Frequent flyers or high-end credit card customers may pay less.) As one satisfied CLEAR member tweeted: “Yea clear is tight. I paid like $200 for the year and cut those long ass lines.”

Unlike TSA Pre (which requires a background check and costs 1/12 as much), CLEAR does not expedite the collective security process; it simply lets some people go ahead of others. As I argued previously in Slate, CLEAR’s business model is based on selling line-cutting privileges to a mandatory government service. If that pisses you off, well, I don’t blame you.

The past year has been a rocky one for CLEAR. Good news came in April, when TSA announced that the company would be able to enroll people into TSA Pre. Becoming a federal contractor for TSA Pre opens a potentially lucrative new business line for the company (albeit one with a possible conflict of interest, since newly approved TSA Pre members would be ripe targets for CLEAR memberships).

But CLEAR also received some bad news. In July, the story broke that in 2022 a man had bypassed CLEAR’s verification system using a false identity (he was subsequently caught by TSA trying to bring live ammunition into Washington’s Reagan National Airport). A probe by TSA uncovered two other instances of failed identity checks at CLEAR facilities. Members of Congress were unhappy, to put it mildly. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the committee overseeing the Department of Homeland Security, told Politico in August that “each passing day the homeland is at greater risk until TSA acts to completely close these security vulnerabilities.”

Amid the uproar over those breaches, TSA began requiring many CLEAR members to present their IDs to TSA staff after passing CLEAR’s biometric scans—just as non–CLEAR members do. That move gravely threatened CLEAR’s business model because it slowed members’ boarding process and undercut the idea—already a stretch—that the company was providing anything beyond a line-hopping service.

CLEAR mounted a high-powered lobbying campaign to defend itself, hiring Jeh Johnson, President Obama’s DHS secretary, to make its case. Those efforts seem to have paid off. With a nod from TSA, CLEAR is now rolling out a new system called Next Gen Identity+, which the company describes, with a Westworld-esque flourish, as “the highest fidelity digital identity.” What that means in practice is that CLEAR members arriving at security will scan their faces, rather than their iris or fingerprints, to confirm their identities. The company insists that this new system will be foolproof and that its past glitches will never recur.

Rep. Wiley Nickel, a North Carolina Democrat, remains wary. “Congress needs to take a look at the security side,” he told me. “The recent failures by CLEAR are very concerning.” Asked if new legislation was in the works, he said, “Those conversations are ongoing.”

But even if CLEAR resolves its security issues, a more fundamental question remains: Why is a company allowed to gatekeep airport security checks, which are a federally mandated process? The insertion of a profit-seeking entity into airport security lines opens a Pandora’s box of bad incentives, especially given the kickbacks—sorry, commissions—that CLEAR pays to airports where new members sign up. According to an investigation by OneZero, those fees can total millions of dollars annually, useful funding for airports that have been searching for ways to offset declining parking revenues.

Think about it: Since airport authorities make more money from CLEAR customers than everyone else, what incentive do they have to improve the security-line process for those who cannot afford CLEAR, fly too infrequently to make it worthwhile, or don’t want to share their biometric data with a private entity?

In fact, airports could see a financial upside from miserable security experiences because they enhance the allure of line-skipping orchestrated (with airports’ blessing) by CLEAR employees. And just as Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has lobbied for years against efforts to simplify tax forms, CLEAR now has every reason to ensure that airports and TSA don’t do anything to make standard security lines less onerous.

To Nickel, CLEAR reflects the familiar gulf between the haves and the have-nots. “We’ve got a real problem with wealth and income inequality in America,” he said. “Airport security is an essential government function, funded by taxpayers. We should level the field to let everyone travel as quickly as possible, regardless of whether you have the extra money to push to the front of the line.”

In fact, he added, he is unsure whether CLEAR belongs in airports at all. “TSA Pre already does a very good job processing people, and CLEAR may be duplicative,” he told me. “Their main benefit seems to be allowing people with lots of money to get through the line faster.”