The revival of CLEAR's Registered Traveler program
contract, negligence, and unjust enrichment
Airports and weary travelers would be seeing, in a matter of a few months, similar programs sprouting back to life. A bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives late last year and pending in the Senate would require TSA to put the program in place.
Several potential buyers competed for the assets of CLEAR, but Algood Holdings won out with a bid of around $6 million. The new company, Alclear, will use the CLEAR brand, Caryn Seidman Becker, CEO at Alclear and founder of Arience Capital Management, told Homeland Security NewsWire. “Same brand, same logo, different company,” she says. The program will remain private and commercially controlled at participating airports. The motto for the resurrected program from FLYCLEAR.com: “The new CLEAR is a customer centric company — we want to rebuild it with you and for you.”
Programs like Global Entry, a trusted traveler program administered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), are charging $100 for a five year membership, but CLEAR does not find them to be a threat to their business. CLEAR hopes to build a strong partnership with Global Entry by integrating their systems. “Interoperability and the use of bio-metric cards are one of our business priorities,” said Becker in a recent interview. Along with using biometric data, Alclear will be considering credential compatibility with government IDs, such as the Defense Department’s Common Access Card and other FIPS 201 (Federal Information Processing Standards) credentials.
When asked about the old CLEAR’s stolen laptop in 2008, and what measures would be taken to prevent such a reoccurrence, CLEAR responded with a promise that no laptops with stored information would be used at airports and that all information would be encrypted. “CLEAR will securely store all customer information using a division of LexisNexis as its database partner.”
Registered traveler programs have suffered in the past due to the problem of false-positives, where someone’s identity is mistaken for someone with the same name who purportedly poses a threat. Unlike the vague parameters used to classify threats to aviation security in the No-Fly List, Becker told Homeland Security NewsWire that “…the enrollment process would enable CLEAR to cross-reference and insure that someone is who they say they are by using their social security numbers, their home address, and other critical facets of identification to help prevent misidentifications.”
In regards to the actual process of enrolling as a CLEAR member, Becker described the twofold process succinctly: “They may choose to enroll online with the entry of personal background information and then submit their biographic data for personal verification in person. Alternatively, customers can enroll in person. Either way, we expect the enrollment process to take five minutes or less.”
The goal is to enhance the security process, not bypass it. We are creating an impermeable chain of confirmation to ensure a traveler is who they say they are. While all of our customers will still be subject to the required physical screening, we are focused on predictability, speed and service,” Becker said.
