Transcript of A CLEAR Path to the Front of the Line

I'm Ayesha Rosco, and you're listening to the Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. It's Labor Day weekend, and if you're lucky, you might be hanging out at the beach and napping or cooking out, but maybe you aren't so lucky. Maybe, like so many on this peak travel weekend, you're standing in a security line at the airport, and you're feeling like some other line is moving faster than yours. It always feels like that. But you might be right because all is not equal in airport security. That fact got us to thinking about what happens when private companies offer services in what we perceive as a public space. We asked producer Kim Naderfein-Petersa to tell us the story of how one company got a stake in airport security.

Hi, Kim. Hey, Ayesha. Nice to be here. Glad to have you here. We are going to start today at the airport security line with this guy.

My name is David Zipper. I am a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative. I focus on ways in which our transportation systems affect our lives.

Zipper, he shared this story with me. It starts in mid-December 2022. He was flying out of Washington, DC, and he had been standing in the TSA line for 20 minutes, long enough to get a little annoyed and to He noticed that at the front of the line, these employees from this company, CLEAR, they were causing a little bit of a holdup.

This person wearing a CLEAR shirt would say, Please wait, and then they would usher somebody from the CLEAR line ahead of them. So it was annoying, to be honest.

And Zipper, he thought that he was in the fast lane. He had paid this small fee to the government, gone through the trouble of a background check, all to get into the TSA precheck line. And yet, here were these people who were still cutting in front of him.

If you think of those old cartoons from 30 years ago, I had angry clouds darkening over my head. I was just starting to fume.

Ayesha, I'm sure that you have seen CLEAR employees at the airport.

Yeah, I've seen them, but I never really understood how it all worked.

Clear is basically a biometrics technology company for about $200. Instead of stopping by a TSA employee who looks at their photo ID, their customers stop by this pod to scan their face or fingers or to verify their identity. And then they get escorted to the front of the TSA line by a CLEAR employee. And when Zipper sees all of this, it makes him think, this is really what people are paying for. It's not that they want biometrics tricks.

It's a line-cutting privilege. That's all it's doing.

So he starts ruminating about a little one-man revolt.

I was thinking, I am not a customer of CLEAR, so why are their employees telling me what to do here.

A few minutes later, he's right at the front, and sure enough, this clear employee asks him to wait.

And ushers a couple in front of me, and I say, No, actually, that's not okay. I don't have a relationship with you, and you can't tell me what to do. What was interesting was the clear employee was used to this and said, Hey, I'm just doing my job. I think the TSA person was also used to this and was just like, You got to wait a minute. So I just swallowed it and I waited. And I'm fuming.

No, I mean, I totally get that. I mean, it sucks when you're waiting on a line and you're seeing other people jumping you. That's going to make you heat it.

Yeah. I mean, I think that we're talking about here are these deep elementary school morals. They are baked very, very, very deep inside of us. And then this clear customer who had just cut in front of him, she turns around and she says to Zipper, I'm really sorry.

I only joined Claire because I freaking hate waiting in those lines. I thought to myself, I need to just write about this. I've had it.

A few days later, he publishes this article for Slate magazine called Annoyed with Clear: The Company that Fast Tracks its Customers Through Airports, Get In Line. In the article, it just takes off.

Sparked a ton of conversation online got a ton of attention from readers because it seems to have tapped into something that a lot of people were feeling viscerally but hadn't seen articulated.

That's something that people were feeling. That's what we're going to explore today. Because in a way, this company embedded into America's airport security, it's this very literal, physical representation of something that's actually happening across the country right now as private companies are inching their way into more and more public services.

Today on the Sunday Story, a look at the tempting promises of privatization and what actually happens when public and private interests try to coexist. That's after the break.

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You're listening to the Sunday Story, and today we're talking privatization. I'm joined by Sunday Story producer, Kim Naderfein-Petersa. So, Kim, under this Trump administration, the idea that businesses are more capable than government seems to run really deep. Yes, this is a conservative talking point, but they're really trying to put it into practice. I'm thinking about DOGE and its attempts to shrink the federal government. And some officials have floated this idea of bringing some form of privatization to public entities, including the US Postal Service.

Yes, that's right. But this whole trend towards privatizing, you mentioned it, it's not a new idea. It really took hold in the 1970s. Since then, we've seen more and more public services, from water systems to electric utilities, prisons and schools, fall into private hands. The Trump administration, it's really just hitting the accelerator.

Tell me about CLEAR. How did it end up in what is otherwise a government-run security process?

It all starts in this moment after 9/11, when the The federal government started to tighten basically the entire airport security system. The government created a whole new agency, the Transportation Security Administration, and introduced this standard security process that all travelers now had to go through. But of course, actually pulling off a system like that is really hard. For a while, it was chaos. Lent along, travelers were annoyed. In 2004, the TSA invited private companies to test out a new approach to security in a series of nationwide pilots. The question that it was trying to understand was, could it improve security overall by identifying low-risk fliers ahead of time through things like background checks, and then move those people through security more quickly? The TSA launched it as the Registered Traveler program. And in 2005, CLEAR launched and became the biggest company in the program. Soon, things for the company were chugging along. They were getting customers, money, and were in airports around the country.

I mean, it sounds like this could be an ideal version of a public-private partnership because CLEAR is supposed to be innovating and it's supposed to be helping more people move efficiently through security, right?

Yeah, that's right. I shared the story of Claire with Donald Cohen, the author of The Privatization of Everything, and he told me…

It's totally fine to hire a private company to help figure something out.

During COVID, 9/11, these moments where there are huge needs, companies can be useful to develop new technologies quickly, especially under government oversight. That's different from letting them be permanent parts of the system. Sure. At this time, some people were already getting annoyed at all of this, but maybe that was a small price to pay for some new approaches in this moment where they're desperately needed.

I I mean, what you're saying is it was a trade-off. But I mean, since we're talking here, it's probably not the end of the story.

Yeah, no. There's a lot more to the story. And next, things take a wild turn. In 2008, the laptop of a clear employee goes missing at San Francisco International Airport, and it has on it the unencrypted personal information of about 33,000 clear users. This is a nightmare situation for a biometric company responsible for a lot of personal data, and what follows is really a media firestorm. Now, around the same time, the government ends the Trusted Traveler program and removes CLEAR's ability to do background checks on flyers. At this point, the value that CLEAR can offer, it really shifts away from identifying low-risk and more towards skip to the front of the line with biometrics. All of this works together to contribute to a loss of trust from investors. In 2009, the company goes bankrupt. Clear Lanes disappear from airports.

But Obviously, it is, as you're saying, it's back because I saw Claire Booths at the airport just the other day. So how did they make this comeback?

So in 2010, two Wall Street investors buy the company out of bankruptcy and relaunch it with a very different vision, this time with biometrics at its heart. This new version of Claire, it wants to use biometric technology for all kinds of things. Just imagine, go to the doctor's office, scan your finger, and get your health records pulled up. Or maybe you go to a baseball game, and then you scan your face on an app and get a beer because they know you're 21.

Oh, my goodness.

The whole idea is like, we want to show up 12 times in your day, not just at the airport, but really be embedded in your life. I asked Kyle McAulfflin about this. He's the executive vice president of Aviation and Clear, and I wanted to understand through his eyes the promise of Clear 2. 0.

In a world where cyber security and fraud and identity theft are becoming more and more rampant, our vision has long been to be able to take what we do in the airports and scale that to something that you're using multiple times a day to be able to confirm that you are in a privacy-centric way that's always opt-in, and in a world where you're only sharing the core elements of your identity that you absolutely need to to unlock a more frictionless experience.

Well, the frictionless experience that's definitely some corporate speak, but I get it. You want to move very fast.

Yes, that is the company's pitch. After my call with McLafflin, I stayed in touch with the communications people at CLEAR because I wanted to run critique by them, that CLEAR is actually just a fancy line cutting service. They told me that really doesn't capture the full picture of what CLEAR offers. As they see it, CLEAR creates just a faster moving line. Their biometric verification is faster, they argue, than a person manually checking an ID. Because we're dealing with machines here, they can have lots of pods going at the same time. It's speeding through the self-checkout lane at the grocery store.

But obviously, the concern with all of this is always, are there security issues? Is your data, which is now linked to your body, is it safe?

Yeah, people have expressed concerns about this. A private company having all of this personal data. The DNA company 23andMe recently went bankrupt. In that process, a lot of people were worried about what would happen to their personal data. That's also a question that people have about CLEAR. Kyle McAfflin, the VP of CLEAR, he said that the company has strict policies to keep people's data safe and that it never sells or rents customer data to anybody.

You are in control of your data. You are in control of what is stored, what is shared, and ultimately have the ability to modify or delete that at any point in time.

He says the company is financially healthy.

I think that the chances of us going bankrupt are relatively slim.

Okay, so then let's talk about security. What's been the track record there since the company relaunched?

So, CLEAR has had two other security incidents that were pretty widely covered. In 2022, someone made it through CLEAR, who was flying under a false identity, and later turned out to have ammunition in his luggage. According to reporting from Bloomberg, this was able to happen because CLEAR used to have this process that when users first registered with the company, if there was some mismatch between somebody's appearance and their ID, that then the computer would flag it, and an employee could override that flag, basically say, It's fine. This person is who they say they are, which introduced some vulnerability for human error. Then in 2023, somebody grabbed a boarding pass out of the trash and was able to make it through CLEAR's screening. In this case, reporting shows that a CLEAR employee escorted them to the TSA desk without verifying their identity at all.

Well, I mean, that sounds pretty bad.

Yeah, it raises a lot of questions. I asked Kyle McAfflin about this. He told me that these incidents were the results of human errors, and so they addressed those people individually and then retrained their entire staff nationally.

Most importantly, we overhauled all of our processes and developed a brand new technology product in partnership with TSA. I think that really highlights the benefit of public-private partnership. We were nimble enough that we were able to pivot and upgrade our entire platform to address these concerns inside of a year.

But these security incidents, they had a ripple effect. In 2023, the TSA introduced new rules and said that when some clear customers get to the front of the TSA line, they will now have to show their ID to the TSA agents.

Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the clear they're screaming?

I mean, yeah. The company's whole promise is that they are going to speed you through security by doing biometric identity verification instead of somebody looking at your ID. But I will say this TSA requirement, it only applies to a certain % of people who are going through CLEAR, not everybody. So some people could still sail through.

Why would airports want to keep CLEAR if it does seem to add all of this frustration and complication to the security process for TSA, the government, and for regular fliers.

Well, they make money off of it. Airports take a cut of the revenue that CLEAR earns. To learn more about the details of this, I talked to Brody Ford. He's a journalist at Bloomberg, and he did an investigation into CLEAR last year. Ford found that LAX, for example, makes about 12. 5% of what CLEAR earns at LAX. In 2023, that was about $5 million.

That's a lot of money.

Yeah, these airports and the company, they're making a lot servicing just this tiny little slice of airport inconvenience. The company is now worth more than $4 billion, which is bigger than some airlines like Jet Blue. But if you remember Claire's ambitions for its relaunch, that it was going to become this big biometrics platform that you would interact with throughout your day. Ford's reporting The funding showed that its other partnerships, like doctor's offices and stadiums, they are not significant sources of revenue for the company. So at this point, it really is this company focused on the airport security line.

So, Kim, where does all of this leave us?

So one thing that I think is really relevant to the future of CLEAR is that in the last few years, the government TSA has really upped its game. These days, TSA precheck, I have to say it looks a lot like early CLEAR. Background checks, expedited screening, even biometric verification. But it only costs about $80 every five years. So one question is, do we still need a company like CLEAR to speed people through airport security. Now, with the expedited government line and the expedited private line, these days, lots of airports have three security lines. Some CLEAR customers have been complaining that CLEAR lines aren't the fastest. At some airports, Ford's reporting shows that the usage of CLEAR has gone down. But under the new Trump administration, things could really turn around for the company. In May, it proposed a budget cut of 247 $7 million to TSA staff, which could mean that the TSA will need a hand from a private partner.

In that case, CLEAR might be perfectly positioned.

Yeah, this could all bode really well for the company. Clear also just made a big announcement that it's implementing e-gates at several airports, which means that instead of stopping at their usual pod, some CLEAR customers can now walk right up to this gate, scan their face in their boarding pass, and then sail right into the zone where travelers in their bags get physically scanned. No more stopping by a TSA agent. Which looks like another sign that under the Trump administration, the TSA might be friendlier. Towards Claire. But of course, this innovation, it's just for CLEAR customers.

There's still this underlying issue of if you have the money, you can speed through this mandated government security process It's a process.

Yeah, exactly. I do think that that inequity is really what's at the heart of this story. It's not some terrible example of privatization gone wrong. People have stayed safe, and that is really what's at stake here. The TSA has clearly done a good job of regulating. But still, there's this feeling that Claire evokes for people, that Zipper experienced when he got caught in line, that nerve that his the cool seemed to touch, and I wanted to understand what that feeling was getting at. I reached out to Michael Sandell. He is a big brain in this space. He's a professor of political philosophy at Harvard and the author of The Moral Limits of markets. When I asked him to help me understand what that nerve might be, he put on his philosopher hat.

Well, let me address it by posing the larger question I think that this raises. The question is, when should you be able to pay to jump the queue? The answer to that question, I think for most of us, depends what people are lining up for. Think of an emergency room in a hospital, and they generally operate by triage. If there's a person there with a sore throat and there's a person there with bullet wounds, even if the person with the sore throat is willing to pay extra, they don't get to cut in line ahead of the person with bullet wounds. In the case of airport security, we're talking about a public good. That's, I think, fundamentally why we bridal at the idea that a private company is allocating access to the security line.

As he sees it, this queue is meant to be a public experience, not to be bought. But when people do pay to jump it, he says something big shifts. Instead of citizens, they become customers.

What separates a customer from a citizen is that the customer can spend however much they want to buy the good or to buy faster service. Whereas to be a citizen is to accept certain inconveniences for the sake of the public good. It's to accept that for certain aspects of life, we stand together. We have equal status.

Sandell added that when money enters the picture, that equal status, it's no longer there. Which means that the distance between people, between the haves and the have nots, in more and more places, it grows. I think that's the thing that we all feel.

Kim, thank you so much for giving us all of this information and taking us on this journey.

Yeah, a journey without having to fly.

Yeah. And just telling us about these private companies and public services.

Yeah. Thank you, Ayesha, for having me.

This episode was produced by Kim Naderfein-Petersa and edited by Jennie Smith. Fact-checking by Greta Pittinger. Sound design consulting by Brenda Baker. Mastering by Robert Rodriguez. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo, Justine Yann, and our Senior Supervising Producer, Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Rosco. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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