Infrastructure Bill Means Your Car Will Spy On You All the Time
By Daniel Greenfield
Not only is everything infrastructure, but a police state is the biggest infrastructure. The infrastructure bill contains a police state built in.
Forget the electric cars and car charges. Sure, they’re a much bigger part of the infrastructure bill than the bridges and tunnels. But the bill has big plans for your car.
And for you.
Tucked away on page 508 of the U.S. Senate’s 2,700-page, so-called “infrastructure” bill, are the plans for a national “per mile fee” pilot program. And it is exactly what it sounds like — the more you drive, the more you pay.
More concerning than cost is privacy. In the name of fighting “climate change” and funding future infrastructure, the federal government would most likely have to track everywhere Americans drive at varying degrees, all while reportedly keeping private data safe.
At first, and on a strictly volunteer basis, the secretary of transportation would track participants from all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico using various methods to record vehicle miles.
The rise of electric cars is the basis for the pay-per-mile program. The Biden administration promised it wouldn’t be doing that. It lied.
Possible recording methods listed in the bill include:
Third-party on-board diagnostic (OBD-II) devices.
Smartphone applications.
Telemetric data collected by automakers.
Motor vehicle data obtained by car insurance companies.
Data from the States that received a grant under section 6020 of the FAST Act.
Motor vehicle data obtained from fueling stations.
Any other method that the Secretary considers appropriate.
Those are the tip of the iceberg because your car will monitor you in all sorts of ways.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill includes a provision that would require auto manufacturers to equip “advanced alcohol monitoring systems” in all new cars.
Buried in the massive proposal—which is already longer than 2,700 pages—is a section titled, “ADVANCED IMPAIRED DRIVING TECHNOLOGY,” which mandates new vehicles include “a system that … passively and accurately detect[s] whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the blood alcohol concentration” of .08, in which case the system would “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation.” Automobile manufacturers would have a three-year grace period to comply with the regulation.
This amounts to monitoring everyone all the time.
The provision doesn’t lay out the exact technologies NHTSA should explore other than to say the final product should “passively monitor” a driver to “accurately identify” whether they can drive their car safely.
And cars that won’t start because of any number of triggers.
Among the systems that have been studied are ones that monitor a driver for signs of distracted, impaired or fatigued driving. One uses sensors that scan drivers’ eyes for signs that are similar to ones that police officers look for when they suspect impairment during traffic stops.
If your eyes scan wrong, good luck getting home. If your car’s spy eye is buggy, good luck getting home. If you offend the overseers, good luck driving ever again.
When I wrote this a decade ago, it was supposed to be a parody.
Anyone can enter and drive a Discord once they undergo a privilege check that connects the driver by remote satellite link to an organic public intellectual with a PhD in Social Justice.
Envia Motors has also reached out to the Muslim community by programming the Discord 2015 to explode when it hears the words, “Jihad”, “Allahu Akbar” or “Shiite.” It will also explode when its internal CPU, which is always monitoring your conversations, hears anything racist, homophobic, transphobic, cisgender, heteronormative or any other thoughtcrimes from a list that is constantly being updated through the cloud.
Sometimes the Discord 2015 will just explode for no reason. Check your privilege.