A System Designed to Fail You Into a Subscription
The Transportation Security Administration has screened roughly 800 million passengers per year in recent years. It has a publicly documented failure rate — in undercover tests — of missing prohibited items between 70 and 95 percent depending on which audit you read. That's not a security agency. That's a performance.
But it's a performance with a very specific commercial structure attached to it. TSA PreCheck costs $85 for five years. You get expedited lanes, no shoe removal, no laptop unpacking. CLEAR, a private company, charges $189 per year for biometric identity verification at airports and stadiums. The Department of Homeland Security's new Touchless ID program proposes to integrate facial recognition into the standard screening process — free, mandatory, and comprehensive.
Stand back and look at what that architecture actually is: the government created a miserable, ineffective screening process, then monetized the escape hatch, and is now building a permanent biometric database as the next iteration. The constitutional lawyer in me finds this deeply interesting. The citizen in me finds it alarming.
What You're Actually Signing Up For
TSA PreCheck is a background check program. You submit personal information, fingerprints, and pay a fee to be judged low-risk. In exchange, you get faster screening. That's a reasonable transaction on its face — the government uses risk tiering in all kinds of contexts.
CLEAR is different. CLEAR is a private company that collects your iris scan, fingerprints, and facial geometry, then sells the expedited-verification service back to you at airports, sports venues, and an expanding list of partner locations. In 2023, CLEAR had approximately 16 million members. Their data sits on private servers, governed by a privacy policy that permits sharing with "business partners" under certain conditions. The company went public in 2021 and is valued as a growth business — which means your biometric data is, in some meaningful sense, a commercial asset.
The Fourth Amendment questions here aren't hypothetical. Courts have long held that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties — the third-party doctrine. But that doctrine emerged in cases about bank records and telephone metadata, not iris scans. Whether voluntarily surrendering biometric data to a private company in order to use an airport constitutes "voluntary" disclosure when the alternative is a 90-minute security line is a question that deserves serious judicial attention. It hasn't gotten it yet.
The Touchless ID Problem
The proposed Touchless ID expansion is a different category of concern entirely. Facial recognition deployed at scale in an environment where attendance is effectively mandatory — you cannot travel domestically by commercial air without passing through TSA — is not analogous to any previous government identification program.
The government currently cannot compel you to produce biometric identification as a condition of using a public road. It absolutely can compel biometric identification as a condition of boarding a commercial flight, and the Touchless ID program would make that collection seamless, invisible, and permanent.
I am not opposed to effective security. I flew through Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv twice in the last decade — the Israelis run the most effective airport security in the world, and it relies almost entirely on trained human intelligence and behavioral assessment rather than theater. We could learn from that. What we are building instead is a mass surveillance infrastructure dressed as a convenience feature.
Read the terms of service before you scan your eyes. Then ask yourself who owns that data in ten years when the company that collected it gets acquired, goes bankrupt, or receives a national security letter. The shoe removal was stupid. This is something else entirely.
