14 DAY TRIAL // In a surprising move, the US Senate has already passed a bill that makes “black box”- or “big brother”-like gadgets mandatory for all cars driven in USA in just two and a half years, infowars.com reports.
The House is expected to quickly approve it while the citizens are probably overjoyed with the fact that they’ll be paying for their own version of George Orwell’s 1984.
Sure all their phone conversations, emails and internet activity is tapped legally by the government ever since the tragic 2001 events, but, what’s really interesting, is the fact that everybody ignores the cost of all this data mining, collecting, storing and monitoring.
Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 states that mandatory event data recorders must in installed in all cars starting in 2015, and it outlines civil penalties that will be levied against violators.
The main function of the black box gadgets would be to record and transmit data that could be used to assist a driver or passengers in the event of an accident, but the bill has legislation built in that would give the government access to the data with a court order, and it also gives authorities access to the data as part of an investigation.
According to the report, these built-in backdoors of the bill could potentially lead to Big Brother-like scenarios where citizens are monitored and actively tracked without their knowledge or consent.
The main issue, in our view, is the fact that this law was not subjected to a public review before being passed and it will require the citizen to spend money and equip his automobile with such a gadget.
By now, everybody knows that a simple mobile phone can be actively tracked with a precision of less than one meter and that the internal microphone can be remotely enabled to listen to any conversation taking place near the phone even if the phone is turned off.
The only way to prevent this from happening is by removing the battery, but these are only ethical concerns that don’t imply spending any amount of money and it’s the citizen’s choice if he would vote for a candidate that supports such laws.
Therefore, requiring the citizen to allocate funds to allow him to drive his property onto public roads is something quite bold for the US government to do.
Besides, it's every buyer’s choice to purchase and use a mobile phone that will likely favor brain cancer, but is it acceptable to have a device that will irradiate the driver and passengers, probably less than a mobile phone, but continuously during any trip?