Clear’s Web site says it will cease operations at 11 pm PDT tonight because parent company Verified Identity Pass is “unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.” No word on what happens to the $128 that its 165,000 members each shelled out as a yearly membership fee.

I don’t normally write about shuttered travel companies, even those that raised $116 million since 2005. But readers of this column may find Clear’s failure worth noting because of a couple of the big media names associated with it.

Spark Capital, which led the $44.4 million round Clear announced less than a year ago, is a venture group that’s now best known as one of Twitter’s primary backers. This is the relatively young firm’s biggest dud, by a long shot. And Clear’s founder, Steve Brill, who stepped down as CEO in March, has been in media forever and used to be known as the guy behind Court TV and the American Lawyer. He’s now one of the three men pushing Journalism Online, which wants to run the payment infrastructure for a yet-to-be-created online content system.

By the way, the “family lanes” I’ve started seeing at some airports, designed for people who know they’re not going anywhere fast and are cool with that? Pretty good. Also: Free.

[Image credit: iowa spirit walker]

“The quintessential thing about New York that makes it different than Silicon Valley is that people here are much more focused on the idea than the technology that is the plumbing for the idea,” said Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV and airport-security-pass firm Verified Identity Pass.

During a panel session focused on digital-media investing in New York, Mr. Brill, a co-founder too of media start-up Journalism Online, called the New York “the best place in the world” to find people who are willing to take a chance. “You have a city with the mentality that is receptive to completely new ideas,” he said.

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I think of Clear as a $100 service that tells terrorists if the FBI is on to them or not. Why in the world would we provide terrorists with this ability?”

– Security technologist Bruce Schneier

Verified Identity Pass’s Clear registered traveler program requires members to submit to in-depth background checks, provide the company with their drivers’ licenses and passport numbers and get hand and/or retina scans. Those who do are given speedier passage through airport security lines.

Given such robust security precautions, it’s ironic, isn’t it, that a laptop containing the personal information of 33,000 Clear customers went missing for a week? How is it that it simply disappeared?

How is it that the information it contained was unencrypted? And, beyond that, what the hell was that information doing on a laptop in the first place? Surely it’s not Verified Identity Pass’s practice to dump entire customer databases on machines without access logging.

Is it?

No, of course not. And, to be fair, the laptop was protected by two levels of passwords. Two! Plus, according to Allison Beer, senior vice president for corporate development of Clear, the data on the laptop weren’t even all that good. “Yes, it was sensitive privacy information, but not the stuff that was most sensitive,” she told The San Francisco Chronicle.

Sensitive, but not that sensitive. Yeah, no big deal, just addresses, birth dates and driver license, passport or green card information. Just the sort of information that might be, you know, used to verify people’s identity when they travel around the country.

As Bruce Schneier presciently noted in his review of Clear in January, 2007, “If you think having a criminal impersonating you to your bank is bad, wait until they start impersonating you to the Transportation Security Administration.”