A CLEAR Path to the Front of the Line

I'm Aisha Roscoe, 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, you know, 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.

So we asked producer Kim Naderfein Petersa to tell us a story of how one company got a stake in airport security.

Hi, Kim.

Hey, Aisha.

Nice to be here.

Glad to have you here.

So 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.

And Zipper, he shared this story with me.

It starts in mid-December 2022.

He was flying out of Washington, D.C., and he had been standing in the TSA line for like 20 minutes, long enough to get a little annoyed and to notice 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 pre-check line.

And yet, here were these people who were still cutting in front of him.

If you think of like those old cartoons from 30 years ago, I had like

angry clouds darkening over my head.

I was just sort of like starting to fume.

And Aisha, 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.

So 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 eyes 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 this, it makes him think, this is really what people are paying for.

It's not that they want biometrics.

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?

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

And ushers like 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.

Oh.

What was interesting was the clear employee was used to this and said, hey, I'm just doing my job.

And as I, and I think the TSA person was also kind of used to this and was just like, You got to wait a minute.

So I just sort of 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 what we're talking about here are these like 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 Clear because I freaking hate waiting in those lines.

And 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.

And the article, it just takes off.

Sparked a ton of conversation online,

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

And 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.

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.

You know, 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 U.S.

Postal Service.

Yes, that's right.

But this whole trend towards privatizing, I mean, you mentioned it.

It's not a new idea.

It really took hold in the 1970s.

And since then, we've seen more and more public services from water systems to electric utilities, prisons, and schools fall into private hands.

And the Trump administration, it's really just hitting the accelerator.

So tell me about Clear.

Like, how did it end up in what is otherwise a government-run security process?

So it all starts in this moment after 9-11, when 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 had to go through.

But of course, actually pulling off a system like that is really hard.

And for a while, it was chaos.

Blent along, travelers were annoyed.

So 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 flyers 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 kind of chugging along.

They were getting customers, raising money, and were in airports around the country.

So, I mean, it sounds like this could be like 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 Clear 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.

So, 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.

So, 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.

So, I mean, what you're saying is like, 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 kind of 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 kind of a nightmare situation for a biometrics 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.

So at this point, the value that Clear can offer, it really shifts away from identifying low-risk fires 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, and in 2009, the company goes bankrupt.

Clear lanes disappear from airports.

But obviously, it is, as you're saying, it's back because, you know, I saw clear 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 Clear, it wants to use biometric technology for all kinds of things.

So 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 like really be embedded in your life.

I asked Kyle McLaughlin about this.

He's the executive vice president of aviation at Clear, and I wanted to understand, through his eyes, the promise of Clear 2.0.

In a world where cybersecurity 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 you 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, you know, I mean,

the frictionless experience, that's definitely, you know, some corporate speak, but I get it.

Like you want to move very fast.

Yes, that is the company's pitch.

So after my call with McLaughlin, I stayed in touch with the communications people at Clear because I wanted to run his critique by them, that Clear is actually just a fancy line cutting service.

And they told me that really doesn't capture the full picture of what Clear offers.

As they see it, Clear creates just like a faster moving line.

Their biometric verification is faster, they argue, than a person manually checking an ID.

And because we're dealing with machines here, they can have lots of pods going at the same time.

So it's like speeding through the self-checkout lane at the grocery store.

But obviously, you know, the concern with all of this is always,

are there security issues, right?

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.

And 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 McLaughlin, 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.

And he says the company is financially healthy.

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

Okay, so then let's talk about security.

Like, 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, like, it's fine, this person is who they say they are, which introduced some vulnerability for human error.

And 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.

So I asked Kyle McLaughlin 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.

And most importantly, we overhauled all of our processes and developed a brand new technology product in partnership with TSA.

And 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 kind of defeat the whole purpose of the clear screening?

I mean, yeah, like 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 percent of people who are going through CLIAR, not everybody.

So some people could still sail through.

So

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 flyers?

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.

So 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 JetBlue.

But if you remember Clear'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 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 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.

And 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 million to TSA's staff, which could mean that the TSA will need a hand from a private partner.

So in that case, Clear might be kind of 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 and their boarding 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 CLEAR.

But of course, this innovation, it's just for CLEAR customers.

So there's still this underlying issue of if you have the money, you can speed through this like mandated government security process.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, 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 Clear evokes for people, that Zipper experienced when he got cut in line, that nerve that his article seemed to touch.

And I wanted to understand what that feeling was getting at.

So I reached out to Michael Sandell.

He is kind of a big brain in this space.

He's a professor of political philosophy at Harvard and the author of The Moral Limits of Markets.

And 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?

And 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 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.

And in the case of airport security, we're talking about a public good.

And that's, I think, fundamentally why we bridle at the idea that a private company is allocating access to the security line.

As he sees it, this kind of queue is meant to be a public experience, not to be bought.

But when people do pay to jump it, he says something kind of big shifts.

Instead of citizens, they become customers.

And 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.

And Sandel 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.

And I think that's the kind of thing that

we all

feel.

Kim, you know, 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 um and you know just telling us about these private companies and public services yeah thank you aisha for having me

this episode was produced by kim nader fame petersa and edited by ginny schmidt fact-checking by greta pittinger sound design consulting by brendan baker mastering by robert rodriguez The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo, Justine Yan, and our senior supervising producer, producer, Liana Simstrom.

Irene Naguchi is our executive producer.

I'm Aisha Roscoe.

Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.

Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks?

Amazon Prime members can listen to Up First sponsor-free through Amazon Music.

Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Up First Plus at plus.npr.org.

That's plus.npr.org.