Commentary
Putting Big Brother in the Driver’s Seat: V2V Transmitters, Black Boxes & Drones
By John W. Whitehead
February 10, 2014
“It’s a future where you don’t forget anything…In this new future you’re never lost…We will know your position down to the foot and down to the inch over time…Your car will drive itself, it’s a bug that cars were invented before computers…you’re never lonely…you’re never bored…you’re never out of ideas… We can suggest where you go next, who to meet, what to read...What’s interesting about this future is that it’s for the average person, not just the elites.”—Google CEO Eric Schmidt on his vision of the future
Time to buckle up your seatbelts, folks. You’re in for a bumpy ride.
We’re hurtling down a one-way road toward the Police State at
mind-boggling speeds, the terrain is getting more treacherous by the
minute, and we’ve passed all the exit ramps. From this point forward,
there is no turning back, and the signpost ahead reads “Danger.”
Indeed, as I document in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,
we’re about to enter a Twilight Zone of sorts, one marked by drones,
smart phones, GPS devices, smart TVs, social media, smart meters,
surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, online banking,
license plate readers and driverless cars—all part of the interconnected
technological spider’s web that is life in the American police state,
and every new gadget pulls us that much deeper into the sticky snare.
In this Brave New World awaiting us, there will be no communication not
spied upon, no movement untracked, no thought unheard. In other words,
there will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
We’re on the losing end of a technological revolution that has already
taken hostage our computers, our phones, our finances, our
entertainment, our shopping, our appliances, and now, it’s focused its
sights on our cars. As if the government wasn’t already able to track
our movements on the nation’s highways and byways by way of satellites,
GPS devices, and real-time traffic cameras, government officials are now
pushing to require that all new vehicles come installed with black box
recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, ostensibly to
help prevent crashes.
Yet strip away the glib Orwellian doublespeak, and what you will find
is that these black boxes and V2V transmitters, which will not only
track a variety of data, including speed, direction, location, the
number of miles traveled, and seatbelt use, but will also transmit this data to other drivers, including the police,
are little more than Trojan Horses, stealth attacks on our last shreds
of privacy, sold to us as safety measures for the sake of the greater
good, all the while poised to wreak havoc on our lives.
Black boxes and V2V transmitters are just the tip of the iceberg,
though. The 2015 Corvette Stingray will be outfitted with a performance
data recorder which “uses a camera mounted on the windshield and a
global positioning receiver to record speed, gear selection and brake
force,” but also provides a recording of the driver’s point of view as
well as recording noises made inside the car. As journalist Jaclyn Trop
reports for the New York Times, “Drivers can barely make a left
turn, put on their seatbelts or push 80 miles an hour without their
actions somehow, somewhere being tracked or recorded.” Indeed, as Jim
Farley, Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Ford Motor Company all
but admitted, corporations and government officials already have a
pretty good sense of where you are at all times: “We know everyone who
breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car,
so we know what you’re doing.”
Now that the government and its corporate partners-in-crime know where you’re going and how fast
you’re going when in your car, the next big hurdle will be to know how
many passengers are in your car, what contraband might be in your car
(and that will largely depend on whatever is outlawed at the moment,
which could be anything from Sudafed cold medicine to goat cheese), what
you’re saying and exactly what you’re doing within the fiberglass and
steel walls of your vehicle. That’s where drones come in.
Once drones take to the skies en masse in 2015, there will literally be
no place where government agencies and private companies cannot track
your movements. These drones will be equipped with cameras that provide a
live video feed, as well as heat sensors, radar and thermal imaging
devices capable of seeing through the walls of your car. Some will be
capable of peering at figures from 20,000 feet up and 25 miles away.
They will be outfitted with infrared cameras and radar which will pierce
through the darkness. They can also keep track of 65 persons of
interest at once. Some drones are already capable of hijacking Wi-Fi
networks and intercepting electronic communications such as text
messages. The Army has developed drones with facial recognition
software, as well as drones that can complete a target-and-kill mission
without any human instruction or interaction. These are the ultimate
killing and spying machines. There will also be drones armed with
“less-lethal” weaponry, including bean bag guns and tasers.
And of course all of this information, your every movement—whether you
make a wrong move, or appear to be doing something suspicious, even if
you don’t do anything suspicious, the information of your whereabouts,
including what stores and offices you visit, what political rallies you
attend, and what people you meet—will be tracked, recorded and streamed
to a government command center, where it will be saved and easily
accessed at a later date.
By the time you add self-driving cars into the futuristic mix, equipped
with computers that know where you want to go before you do, you’ll be
so far down the road to Steven Spielberg’s vision of the future as
depicted in Minority Report that privacy and autonomy will be
little more than distant mirages in your rearview mirror. The film, set
in 2054 and based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, offered movie
audiences a special effect-laden techno-vision of a futuristic world in
which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. And if
you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will bring
you under control.
Mind you, while critics were dazzled by the technological wonders displayed in Minority Report,
few dared to consider the consequences of a world in which Big Brother
is, literally and figuratively, in the driver’s seat. Even the
driverless cars in Minority Report answer to the government’s (and its corporate cohorts’) bidding.
Likewise, we are no longer autonomous in our own cars. Rather, we are
captive passengers being chauffeured about by a robotic mind which
answers to the government and its corporate henchmen. Soon it won’t even
matter whether we are seated behind the wheel of our own vehicles,
because it will be advertisers and government agents calling the shots.
Case in point: devices are now being developed for European cars that
would allow police to stop a car remotely, ostensibly to end police
chases. Google is partnering with car manufacturers in order to
integrate apps and other smartphone-like technology into vehicles, in
order to alert drivers to deals and offers at nearby businesses. As
Patrick Lin, professor of Stanford’s School of Engineering, warns, in a
world where third-party advertisers and data collectors control a good
deal of the content we see on a daily basis, we may one day literally be
driven to businesses not because we wanted to go there, but because
someone paid for us to be taken there.
Rod Serling, creator of the beloved sci fi series Twilight Zone and
one of the most insightful commentators on human nature, once observed,
“We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective
about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”
Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of
thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and
utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do
everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think,
what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate
with, and on and on.
In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police
state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it
what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal
responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome
obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a
society in which we have no true freedom.
Pandora’s Box has been opened and there’s no way to close it. As Rod
Serling prophesied in a Commencement Address at the University of
Southern California in March 17, 1970:
“It’s simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don’t listen to that scream - and if we don’t respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.”
You can add the following to that list of needs requiring an urgent
response: Police abuse is here and now. Surveillance is here and now.
Imperial government is here and now. Yet while the vehicle bearing down
upon us is indeed registered in our own name, we’ve allowed Big Brother
to get behind the wheel, and there’s no way to put the brakes on this
runaway car.
WC: 1651
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