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Clear, the company known for giving their clients a free pass through security lines at airports, abruptly closed its doors on Monday.

Founded by journalist Steven Brill, Clear allowed members to skip long security lines for just 200$ a year. Of course this luxury was given to travelers for the mere exchange of all their vital information, including social security number, credit card, fingerprints and even an iris scan. Now that the company is no more, members are left to wonder about where this information is now being kept and by whom.

Clear has stated that it will attempt to sell their 250,000 members sensitive info to another company offering such fast lanes, but the duration of this window has not been specified. Is it worth 200$ a year to have such vital information on the market? Clear claims the information is in safe hands, but peace of mind is something I could never put a price on.

In our modern day and age of technology and media it has become common to gage the level of importance of an incident by the amount of internet traffic that it produces. Last Thursday, after the two popular media icons passed away, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, cyberspace search engines and social networking sites were flooded with hits. Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times pointed out:

When Jackson’s death was first reported, traffic across the Internet spiked to virtually unprecedented levels. Google’s search engine slowed to a crawl; Yahoo reported “one of the biggest things” in its history; social networks Twitter and Facebook nearly collapsed under the weight of traffic. This newspaper experienced 12 million page views at its website, apparently because it was widely credited with confirming the death.      

Despite any criticism MJ may have received throughout his life, it was fairly obvious that his death provoked a whirlwind of reminiscent comments and photographs posted throughout cyberspace. Without him, pop culture will never be the same and his fans and enemies alike have acknowledged this.      ___________________________________________________________________________________