Why am I getting weird security questions with CLEAR?

Question

A couple of times airport staff in SF/NY have tried to enroll me in CLEAR. I'm on a visa (O1), but I have a California ID card, so I should be eligible. That's at least what the staff has told me every time. CLEAR is useful for me, since I fly often and am not eligible for TSA Pre or Global Entry.

However, each time I've tried, the following thing happen after scanning my fingerprints and retinas: The registration machine starts asking me weird questions on the form "which of the following places have you ever lived" with a bunch of places I've never heard of. (I Googled them afterward, and they were all in the NY/Jersey area). And "which of the following phone numbers have you had in the past", and they were all (570) numbers, which is apparently Pennsylvania.

I have to keep answering "None of the above" and the CLEAR person eventually gets annoyed and says something like "we can't register you if you keep not answering the questions". I don't understand what's going on.

Does this happen to anyone else? Is this the machine being confused? Is it a sign somebody in the NY/Pennsylvania area is impersonating me? Or is it simply a sign that being on a visa is not enough, and CLEAR only works for permanent citizens?

Answer 1

Officially, CLEAR is only supposed to be available to US citizens and permanent residents:

CLEAR is currently only available to US citizens and legal permanent residents 18 and older with a valid government-issued photo ID.

I imagine the reason for the weird questions is that CLEAR is doing a lookup for a "Thomas Ahle" who is a citizen/resident, finds someone with a similar name, and then tries to verify that you're that person. I've registered for CLEAR before as a permanent resident and the questions were all relevant to my identity.

Answer 2

The sort of questions you are seeing are curated from public records (property ownership records, etc.) and credit reports (mortgage/car payments) and probably other proprietary sources as well. If the system can't find anyone with your same name and birthday, or cannot produce enough questions, then it "gives up" and asks nonsense questions whose correct answer is "none of the above" (used to happen to me). If you have lived in the US for less than say two years, then it's likely they won't have any "real" questions. Probably CLEAR knows that the "none of the above" answers don't actually prove anything, which is why they aren't letting you in. Unfortunately, I don't know a way around this other than to wait until you have a bigger "footprint" in the US (e.g. real estate or car ownership, bank accounts, credit cards) so that your set of questions will be "real" questions.

It is unlikely that they incorrectly matched you with a different person with the same name, birthdate, and/or similar fingerprints. For one thing, that would mean the "none of the above" answer would be wrong, and the system would have said that immediately.

As the other answer points out, you may be ineligible for CLEAR due to not being a US Citizen or Permanent Resident. However this almost certainly has nothing to do with your difficulty with the public records questions.

Answer 3

If you're wondering why all the weird questions for addresses you never had, that is a common method used by identity verification services. They choose an obscure question from your history, like past addresses, phone numbers, vehicles owned etc. They give you a list of options, one of which might be true for you, and say "which of these is one you had?" Of course they are all nonsense, except for possibly one.

This is a good thing. This is a clever security check.

The reason to give you all wrong ones and a "none for of the above" button is to make it much harder for an imposter to get lucky, and to accommodate the possibility that they are trying to match you to the wrong record.

The imposter could be an automated script, which gets you into a complicated calculus at making the problem solvable by a legitimate human, but resource-prohibitive for an automated attack to succeed.