WORKING THE CROWD

Clear cofounders Caryn Seidman-Becker and Ken Cornick at Yankee Stadium

THE MID - AUGUST SUN IS UNKIND AS hundreds of baseball fans—fresh off the equally oppressive Bronx subway platform—stand in a line at Gate 6 outside Yankee Stadium clenching bottled waters. While they wait to empty their pockets, open their purses, and walk through one of the magnetron scanners to see their home team take a beating from the Tampa Bay Rays, a middle-aged man zips past the queue through a separate lane and presses his fingers against a screen at a kiosk with the word clear emblazoned on the sides in blue. I flag him down. The 50-year-old is a New York City resident and three-year member of the Clear program. Was he concerned at all, I ask, about giving a private company his fingerprints simply for the ability to skip a line?

He seems surprised by my question. “Clear having my fingerprints is the least of my worries,” he says. “I’m more worried about my computer getting hacked or something.”

Americans really hate lines. Clear, the New York–based company that counts millions of U.S. citizens (or legal residents) as loyal