A new bill, the first of its kind in the U.S., would ban security screening company Clear from operating at California airports as lawmakers take aim at companies that let consumers pay to pass through security ahead of other travelers.
Sen. Josh Newman, a California Democrat and the sponsor of the legislation, said Clear effectively lets wealthier people skip in front of passengers who have been waiting to be screened by Transportation Security Administration agents.
“It’s a basic equity issue when you see people subscribed to a concierge service being escorted in front of people who have waited a long time to get to the front of TSA line,” Newman told CBS MoneyWatch. “Everyone is beaten down by the travel experience, and if Clear escorts a customer in front of you and tells TSA, ‘Sorry, I have someone better,’ it’s really frustrating.”
If passed, the bill would bar Clear, a private security clearance company founded in 2010, from airports in California. Clear charges members $189 per year to verify passengers’ identities at airports and escort them through security, allowing them to bypass TSA checkpoints. The service is in use at roughly 50 airports across the U.S., as well as at dozens of sports stadiums and other venues.
Either everyone needs TSA screening or we don’t need it at all. Get rid of it. Problem solved.
Clear doesn’t skip screening… It skips to the front of the line to be screened.
Everyone still gets screened.
They are also pre-screened and interviewed to get into the program.
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Good Guy California getting rid of pay-to-win subscription for air travel.
More like pay to get to the gate and sit longer. There is no real winning.
What’s the fucking point of the TSA if you can just pay extra to bypass it?
It doesn’t really seem like a stretch that a terrorist organization could come up with a little extra money per ticket to make sure their plan pays off.The company runs a background check to verify that the person isn’t a terrorist. Then at the airport they use biometrics to verify their identity.
I don’t trust a private company to do that screening. They will skimp on checks to save money the moment they have a bad quarter unless there are specific rules forced on them by TSA.
What’s preventing one of their software developers from just creating a bunch of approved people? Probably not much.
Sounds like what tsa should be doing. Either security is necessary or it isn’t. The airport is the most classist place in the country.
That’s the premise of TSA pre check. Clear just adds biometric verification instead of a TSA agent checking IDs.
Honestly, it’s stupid and I’ve refused to use it because I don’t trust companies with that biometric data. I saw TSA try to use similar at an airport once and I specifically opted out.
Tsa precheck is better than clear anyway. Clear just puts you at the front of the normal line. Precheck allows you to skip the normal line entirely.
I had to travel with a school group recently so couldn’t use Pre. At the front of the TSA line, they took my ID, then had me stand in front of a camera and display screen. It showed it scanning my face and clearly doing face feature segmentation (eyes, nose, hairline, etc).
So that’s now happening too.
Sounds like what tsa should be doing.
That is what TSA is doing. Clear just lets you bypass the TSA Precheck line and go straight to the xray machine and metal detector (they don’t use full body scans on that side).
Ah so it’s for drug trafficking not terrorism
TSA has always been security theatre. Have they ever stopped a credible threat?
I can’t believe I’m saying something positive about them, but they keep about 6,500 guns off planes a year. Irrespective of thoughts on gun control measures, I think most would consider a gun on a plane a credible threat.
So that means the TSA could do the same thing for anyone with Pre-Check or Global Entry since we already had to go through all that.
Clear doesn’t bypass TSA. It just skips you to the front of the line.
It does bypass TSA. The Clear agent goes up to the front of the TSA line, tells the TSA agent “This one is okay, I checked, you don’t need to,” and through you go.
They take you to the front of the line but, they still need to go through the actual screening (metal detector, bag scanning).
From the clear website: Simply step up to a CLEAR Pod at the airport where you’ll scan your boarding pass and eyes or fingerprints, and an Ambassador will escort you to the front of the security line for your screening.
Isis: we would love to suicide bomb a plane, but the budgets a bit tight this month and we just can’t afford to cover the TSA skip.
Everyone is beaten down by the travel process
TSA has been proven to be a sham time and time again. They’re ineffective at best. Just get rid of it already.
I also fail to see how this is really any different than paying for TSA pre check. The only main difference is skipping the security line but what difference is that really? Both are paid for services that allow the “rich” (yeah right) to get through security quicker. The real rich aren’t traveling in public transportation. Why don’t we ban private planes?
Oh and no offense to the, mostly, good people working there with the public on the front lines. They’re typically pleasant and great with the kids in my family’s experience.
TSA Precheck involves a background check and interview. This allows the actual screening process to be lighter.
I don’t recall an interview, just fingerprinting.
I had to go through a full interview to get a TSA precheck. Lots of invasive probing questions about who I am and where I work and what my family ties are.
My initial application was like eight (?) years ago, I wonder if they’ve changed it? Maybe they don’t interview everyone?
Did it this year. Some web forms, then went to a place that finger printed me and checked my ID. That was it.
Based on this completely ad hoc “survey,” that would indicate that they do perform interviews, but not for everyone.
I’m sure there’s not any racial profiling going on, no sir.
The real rich
What some lower-middle class Americans don’t realize is that to the great majority of people in this world… we are the rich.
In the US we look at someone making $75,000+, $100,000+, $150,000+, $250,000+, 500,000+, 1,000,000+, 1,000,000,000+ as rich… depending on what our current income level is. The reality is that even making 30k in the middle of nowhere is still better than 85% of the world’s income and quality of living.
If you can save $10,000 a year you can save more than 60% of people in the world actually earn.
When I point this stuff out though I get a ton of downvotes. Imagine buying a car, a plane ticket, or personal electronics when your total pre-tax pay is 10k or less… that is most people’s situation who are alive today (but less than 30% of Americans!) As a bonus, imported goods are typically cheaper in the US then almost any other country. Hair Gel that is $5 here is easily $20 USD in Santiago, Chile.
There should be way more taxes on the highest earners and more mechanisms that siphon wealth away from those with extreme excess. Just be aware that Americans overall have the most to lose if this goes to a global scale. A lot of things we take for granted and expect are luxury for billions.
So what’s the difference between this and TSA pre check? You have to pay for that too so the money privilege argument makes no sense here.
This is my exact question, too. I have Pre-Check and I love it because it is like travelling prior to Sept-11.
Pre-Check is cheaper than Clear because it’s like $100 but it lasts for 2-3 years, so again, it’s a separation between those who can pay and those who can’t. Also, what’s next? Every airline removes First, Business, Basic Economy “classes”?
Banning Clear doesn’t resolve the “class” issue. What would be better is to just improve the entire TSA process so that it’s not so miserable for everyone, or let’s get more of those high-speed rails built so we have more travel options and airlines have enough competition to force improvement.
TSA Pre is $75 for five years.
The problem with services like Clear is that for even more money, you get to skip to the front of the TSA Pre line, too. It also means that a private company (with what kind of oversight, do we even know?) gets to do the security screening instead of TSA.
If you don’t think it’s all security theater, I don’t know what to say.
Kind of. TSA Precheck is <$100 for 5 years, so it’s significantly cheaper. That amount is a lot more accessible to average travelers than CLEAR.
Most people enrolled in those programs are frequent business travelers who charge it to the company.
When I was traveling all the time I did global entry. Since it was for work, I paid for it with my companies credit card. I also did the interview during company hours, drove to the interview in a company vehicle, and paid for parking and lunch on the company dime.
Nobody blinked at the expense. Of course it was the same month I traveled for 3 weeks, hit 5 countries and 10 states. It took me a full day to do my expense report.
From what I can tell there are two main differences:
- TSA pre check isn’t guaranteed; you can have pre check and still be randomly selected for a full screening. Clear you always get a “light” screening.
- Pre check you still go through the TSA security, just with a less intensive screening and shorter line. Clear has it’s own little security area that bypasses TSA completely
There maybe others, but these seem to be the most important.
TSA Precheck involves a background check and interview performed by the government. This allows them to make the actual screening process lighter, because they’ve deemed you to be low risk.
With Clear, you still have to go through the full security check. And it also costs significantly more.
- Precheck: $14/y
- Clear: 190$/y
The cost of TSA Precheck is $70 for 5 years, so $14 per year (plus an additional $8 for the initial enrollment). If you travel internationally a lot you can upgrade to Global Entry for $100 for 5 years. Or if you travel to Canada frequently, you can get Nexus (a superset of Global Entry) at $50 for 5 years.
It’s hard to make the money privilege argument with Precheck at that price.
Security Theater
Neoliberalism y’all, TSA’s equipment and all the services that go along with it are actually revenue streams invented by mega donors. The “free” market in action.
This is on brand. Government thinks the problem is the “for pay” scheme to make the process more tolerable while forcing us into a system (TSA) that has NEVER been shown to prevent anything other than happiness. The problem isn’t with Clear, it is with TSA asshats. How about make a system that works so that no one needs Clear?
You are right, but having a system like Clear also incentivizes the whole system to be worse to increase sales. While it’s not a whole solution, it’s a good move, imo.
I disagree. Clear gives wealthy an “out” and incentivizes the TSA system to NOT change. Clear is increasing sales but there is no relationship between their sales and TSA. TSA is not incentivized to make Clear more money. It’s a bad move.
Can I ask what the better working system would look like? I’ve seen plenty of the stories about TSA lapses, obviously security at the airports isn’t fun, but I’m not sure what an alternative system that works would look like.
I’m all for doing a risk based analysis of people and having a higher or lower level of scrutiny based on that analysis. “Ability to pay” shouldn’t be part of that analysis. Of course, given the history of problems with building such system, I also don’t expect that the TSA (or any group) is going to do well building a risk based system which isn’t:
I don’t know why clear pisses me off so much but it does. It’s just not fair imo, but life isn’t fair.
Because it says you are a second class citizen.
This seems like a good step. If the security bottleneck is mandated for all of us by the government, then people who don’t like it should work to improve it. Though I guess the owner class proper doesn’t really have to deal with any of it, with special processes to get to private jets.
But, this is also air travel we’re talking about. Every single step of the process to get from A to B is as enshittified and monetized as possible. Zero surprise that it’s the same with security.
Seems good, but if you are trying to make airport screening more equitable, why just Clear? What about “Sky Priority” and “Precheck”? I’m wondering if the airlines are lobbying for this.
Improve TSA? Nah. Let’s ban the better system instead.
This is 100% political pandering. It has nothing to do with fixing a real problem.
California is not able to set policy for a federal agency. What they can do is end the “relief value” that lets people skip the bad policies for money.
At that point, the people with money may start putting pressure on the federal government to improve the TSA.
So they are doing exactly what youre asking them to, in the only way they can.
Yeah CLEAR just needs to be it’s own line, no problem. Need to do this with special assistance and higher class of service lines too.
As a person who used to frequently travel for work it’s still really annoying to be in a line with people who don’t know the rules they paid for even if it’s in a separate line. I’m still waiting for the line you have to pass a time trial to get access to.
