Wednesday, October 10, 2007

I hate being right. Again.

Ladies and gentlemen, y'all will recall a while ago I posted some articles to do with the computer in your car, and how it stores data on your driving habits.  The cops can and do use this data in court against drivers all the time.  Cars also phone home to Momma, OnStar can track any of their units with GPS already, and do.  Sometimes to catch car thieves, sometimes just speeders.

At the time I opined in typical feverish Phantom paranoia that pretty soon the computer would be able to shut the car down if the cops didn't like what you were doing.  Well, it didn't take long.  I hate being right.  From the AP write up:

Starting with about 20 models for 2009, the service will be able to slowly halt a car that is reported stolen, and the radio may even speak up and tell the thief to pull over because police are watching.

OnStar already finds 700 to 800 cars per month using the global positioning system. With the new technology, which OnStar President Chet Huber said GM will apply to the rest of its lineup in future years, OnStar would call police and tell them a stolen car's whereabouts.

Then, if officers see the car in motion and judge it can be stopped safely, they can tell OnStar operators, who will send the car a signal via cell phone to slow it to a halt.

Why would GM do this?  The cops asked them to.  Seems the cops would very much like to be able to stop cars by remote control as well as track them anywhere.  One immediately assumes the criminal car chase scenario, which would be just fine.  But how about if they would like to stop all the cars on a certain street?  Or all the cars in a certain town between the hours of 11 PM and 7 AM, or ... you get the picture.  And remember kids, what is optional now can be made compulsory any time.

Man I hate being right.

The Not Nearly Paranoid Enough Phantom

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Phantom: The technologies you describe were in development stage 15 years ago when I visited Intel's wafer fabrication facility...I was with an engineer who interfaced with our rep firm and he was quite candid about the technologies planned for the automotive industry ( 25% of Intel's output was consumed by the auto trade then...I suspect it's significantly higher now)

At the time the "planned" natural progresssion was to interface the car data logger with the GPS and WAAS line of sight earth statins that triangulate your exact position to within 3cm and broadcast this to Onstar repeaters.

Also of the future application expansion was to give federal and police authorities a direct feed to their (the automotive data logging head end computers) so they can do whatever they want with the info...like how many cars are on the road at any given time, average speed and position...concentration of traffic...destinations and stops...or just single out one driver and get a log of his driving/destination data.

Intel and the auto makers set 2007 as the year for total system integration and 2010 to have 90% of the population on this system's grid.

We all know big brother loves gathering info on us but you have to wonder where this technology is going....like if you don't play ball with authorities or banks or other establishment demands,...or they don't like the palces you drive to or the way you drive, they just simply "turn off" your car and make you walk?

The Phantom said...

Thanks for stopping by, WL.

I think they are going exactly where you said with this. Run a red light, your car turns off. Speed and your car turns off. Visit the LCBO too many times in a week and your car turns off.

You can just see the little gears turning in their tiny minds as they run through all the possibilities of making stupid you and stupid me CONFORM to their utopian social structure.

What worries me is when I think about what the Chicoms would do with this. Comrade Ping at the Ministry of Whatever doesn't like you today, just because, or maybe because he's thinking of taking your wife away from you, and your car turns off. Nice, eh?

Kinda makes you wonder if some day soon the cars of every Conservative are all going to magically fail on the same day. Like election day maybe? That's how they think.

Anonymous said...

Well Phantom: The truism about power corrupting is a self-evident universal truth. Having the ability to cut a person off the support grid by electronically nulling his credit/savings (once money is totally cashless) or to control his independent mobility by denying him the freedom of self-reliant long distance travel (via the personal car) this is a terrible power to wield indeed.

I wonder if we ever realize how important our persoanl cars are to our independence and our economic freedom. We needn’t rely on the government for fast long distance reliable transportation. Driving a car isn’t a “privilege” it’s a direct extension to our right to mobility and to earn a better living.

I have to ask why these remote car “turn off” functions are in the cars and travel data linked to the feds if mobility control is not an ultimate goal??

I have always suspected that the establishment elites who actually control our governments policy agendas have been scheming for ways to make us all a more reliant, controlled captive population…. either for corporate purposes or political ones....one of the keys to the post WW2 rise of the Middle class was the widespread use of the personal auto which freed us from our captivity in local labor/consumer markets…reliable independent transportation freed us from only selling our wares and skills in a local labor market controlled by an oligopolistic economic cartel which held immobile workers/consumers/producers captive to local prices and wages which they set ....now, with affordable personal transportation the rising middle class worker had the ability to sell goods and labor in other distant markets where they get a better price for it...freeing the middle class from corporate/government reliance/control and enriching them and making them the prevalent affluent segment to which government and corporations cater.

Big government and big corporate power hate “catering” to anything…their agenda is to control and monopolize…the middle class stands in the way…the middle class must have their empowerments truncated to make them reliant and controllable.

Thus it is changing....I see government, established elite and corporations ganging up on the middle class and disempowering it economically and in its individual freedoms...key among them is the freedom of mobility.

Cars are becoming a luxury and hard to keep, fuel and insure...a driver’s licence is increasingly hard to keep due to a multitude of regulatory and corporate demands on it which hold the right of free mobility by driving a car as a imperial dispensed "privilege".

Cars are under attack by the UN/CFR global left for causing AGW…they have an agenda to completely remove affordable personal transport…the statist right attacks the right to drive by inventing new legislative reasons to remove a driving licence (none of which are related to driving ability/safety record….but more a matter of paying tax bills and court ordered corporate debts). This last scenario is akin to debtor’s prison of the Dickens era…miss an alimony payment or a tax payment or a fine or a court enforced debt collection and they take your right to dive away…which essentially takes your ability to earn away…which is a endless paradox…unemployed can’t pay debts….now we see they will soon have the ability to arbitrarily permanently remotely disable your car…that is a regulator’s wet dream…so you can imagine the host of petty politically incorrect crimes that will now set you afoot and into a lower economic class.

If successful in stigmatizing/legislating unrestricted individual access to independent transportation the net result will be a nation of large urban immobile populations reliant on government for transportation of all life sustaining things from food to transport to work…it’s much easier to control captive urban populations….just as the Robber barons of the late 19th century knew…..and it seems to be the way things are going again.

Go look at a current mass transit terminal in the nations in an advanced stage of martial statism….there is a reason public transportation terminals look like a martial law gulag.