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With all due respect, if I want privacy I can put my smartphone in a shielded bag, but government is going to treat my car’s broadcast of its ID as a matter of safety and it will be a crime to disable it, just as it is a crime for the tire shop to leave out the TPM (tire pressure monitor) the next time the tires are changed.

Just take a simple issue like being able to disconnect your front passenger air bag. There is a government form with severe criminal sanction of 18 USC 1001 if you check the wrong box:

“Part F. Certification

I certify to the U.S. Department of Transportation that the information, certifications, and understandings given or indicated by me on this form are truthful, correct, and complete to the best of my knowledge and belief. I recognize that the statements I have made on this form concern a matter within the jurisdiction of a department of the United States and that making a false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement may render me subject to criminal prosecution under Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001.”

As to tracking, I don’t believe that is the motivation of the engineers or the auto companies, but that could be the very same thing we would expect the engineers at Motorola or AT & T to say when they were developing the cell phone. And we know how that turned out.

You don’t hesitate to use the government’s own destruction of the Fourth Amendment as the reason why I should not worry that someone very soon will not develop the “Stingray” cell phone spoofer equivalent of a Stingray for spoofing passing vehicles into spilling their guts to the device.

And recall that law enforcement has vigorous denied that there was such as thing as a Stingray.

Now with a cell phone, we could have preserved our privacy had the manufacturers not acceded to government’s demand that all phones be trackable all the time. We could have just had a “reveal location” button so disclosure would have been off by default. But no, disclosure of location is continuous and mandatory and now nobody can opt out.

I return to my original suggestion. If the designers of this new vehicle location system are being honest about preserving privacy, let us see the steps they are taking. Let us not make silly design mistakes that open gaping holes for Stingrays to penetrate. One way to do this is to give each vehicle’s ID only a limited lifetime, where it comes up with a new random number frequent enough to preclude government from tracking my drive down the interstate.

Let this device save lives, but not at the expense of liberty. Careful and honest engineers can design with both concerns in mind. I have options in my life. I can always rebuild my existing vehicles. Government is not going to destroy their utility. Too many poor illegal immigrants to pander to.