Flying Clear

One of the "perks" that I afforded myself, is a subscription to Clear, the pre-screened security lane, now at a number of major airports. The original start up was at my home base, MCO or Orlando International, and I signed up quit early on. This excellent facility means that I now know within a minute or two, how long it will take between arriving at the airport and arriving at the gate. As frequent travelers know, it is often not about how long something takes but how consistent it is, this allowing effective planning. Clear certainly gives me that consistency. It is unfortunate that it is not more widespread at airports around the country, of course at the moment, YWG (Winnipeg) is such a small airport that security is almost like a Clear lane anyway.
There are however some annoyances with this service, not the fault of Clear, but due to our dear friends at the TSA. Originally this service was intended as pre-screening that would enable the person to undergo a less rigorous screening once at the airport. Ideas such as no need to remove shoes, leaving the laptop in the case were floated, but other than the first (removing shoes), nothing really good had materialized. If you look at what Israeli security experts say, namely focus on finding the bad guys and not on finding bad stuff, you can see that TSA are not following that advice. I understand that they want to be sure that even a pre-screened person does not bring prohibited materials on board, but surely they could make better use of the fact that we have passed a background check to make their searches more effective. For example, if 'Clear'ed passengers could leave their laptops in their bags, they would pass through security that more quickly, leaving more time to spend on non-pre-screened persons. Or perhaps we would not need remove the ziploc bag with toiletries, etc.
In fact, a few months ago TSA went from bad to worse; namely, on arrival at the Clear lane, it is now necessary to show photo ID as well as the Clear card. Given that the latter is a bionmetric encoded card, with far superior security than most drivers licenses, it seems a rather stupid decision.
As mentioned above, in addition to the shorter line, there is one other small "perk" when I fly out of Orlando. The Clear machines also check my shoes for metal, and if there is none, and if I am not the "nth" Clear passenger, I can keep my shoes on (whoop-dee-do). I will not mention the number represented by "nth", for fear of alerting terrorists to state secrets, but it is a relatively low number.
Unfortunately, Clear does not use the "puffer" gates either. Once, leaving DCA (Washington DC), I participated in a trial of this device. Keep your coats, jackets and shoes on, just stand in the gate for a few seconds, while puffs of air are directed at you and then step right on through. It certainly beats taking everything off, putting it in a tray and then getting dressed again.
Hopefully TSA will review their procedures and change them so that flying Clear is not just an different kind of frequent traveler lane, but becomes a lane where travelers can be processed quickly and effectively.