Thank you for the correction.

Here is the exact wording :

Dear German Expat,

As of June 2009 you had 267 days remaining on your CLEAR membership. We will honor your remaining term. Your free period will begin when you use your CLEARcard for the first time or when we open in your home airport, whichever is first. Please hold on to your CLEARcard - it still works (no biometric enrollment necessary). If you need a new card, Click Here.

We look forward to seeing you in the CLEARlane

Best,
The CLEAR Team
[email protected]

----------
So its not completely true about home airport opening. Your ticker will start with first usage (e.g. you use it not at your home airport) or when your home airport opens, whichever is first.

Starwoman has two artificial hips which are always a problem with traditional magnetometers. We also love the new backscatter machines - she's through in an instant, with no waiting for a "female assist", and no groping.

So you love the doses of ionizing radiation that you receive each time you go through the machine? :rolleyes:

I have no problem with this being a OPTION for Starwoman.

Apparently birdstrike's post is correct, given the following email's words end up actually describing the real workings of this lame excuse of a protection racket getting started up again.

So, an obvious issue with discussions on forums like this is that one can't be expected to have any idea of the background of a poster. I have a PhD in physics and 200 refereed scientific publications on ionizing radiation. And yes, I'm ok with the dose. What's your own technical background in this area?

How do you know what the actual dose will be? It's easy to agree to a 15ml blood sample being drawn, but if they end up drawing 5L in the same time due to a failure to monitor and control automated pumping, it may well be too late. Do you really trust the TSA to have everything under control? Color me a skeptic.

Agree-- this is the perfect use of the WBI/AIT: as an option for those who alarm the WTMD and perfer that to a patdown. It should never be used for primary screening.

That's the risk.

So, I'm waiting for the mods to swoop in and (correctly) accuse us of getting too far OT, but.... Life in a modern technical civilization is full of risk, much of it due to human error/carelessness, like the TSA not maintaining the machines correctly, so they deliver an incorrectly high dose, as you point out. If you are rationally worried about this risk, you try to evaluate it, figure out your own tolerance, and decide how to live. When you pass through a TSA X-ray, you also always do two other amazingly risky things that same day, subjecting you to huge risk from human errors and frailities: you drive to and from the airport (your car could explode due to a gas leak, or more likely, you are hit by an incompetent driver); and you pack yourself into an aluminum tube built, maintained, and flown by the lowest bidder, sometimes with pilots with 300 hours total time paid less than shift managers at McDonalds, and travel near Mach 1 at 8 miles altitude. You may evaluate all these risks differently than I do. My own evaluation is that the risk of an X-ray overdose is the least of your worries on an air travel day. You're entitled to evaluate it differently, although if you claim that your evaluation is technical and quantitative, rather than a hunch, it would be good if you had technical credentials in that field.

Yeah-- we should probably continue this discussion in one of the other threads-- I don't have anything more to contribute on the topic . . . but we go OT all the time here and as long as we avoid OMNI topics, we seem to be OK.

Anyway, CLEAR or Alclear doesn't seem to offer any benefit other than cutting in line.

Quite right -- line jumping is the only benefit, along with certitude of how much time to allow at the airport. If you fly every week from a congested airport, it's a huge benefit, well worth the price to many of us, even if it is bizarrely unconnected from all the private info they collected, and all the promises that collection of that info seemed to imply at the time, but never came true.

+1

For those that fly out of MCO, this is definitely a good thing to have, especially if you are flying UA. Those lines are crazy!

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...-security.html

No, monitor was correct and I was wrong

Which is why the TSA vetting is bullhockey and totally unnecessary and unrelated to what CLEAR currently offers.