Posted on 05/21/2022 4:22:28 AM PDT by MtnClimber
President Joe Biden recently signed a law mandating (persondating?) that all new vehicles sold after 2026 must be equipped with electronic “kill switches.” These switches could conceivably be used by government officials—or hackers—to seize control of one’s car without permission or oversight.
Oddly enough, the law was essentially hidden inside of the administration’s LGBTQ-friendly $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that was passed late last year.
The “kill switch law” would potentially allow law enforcement to shut one’s car off remotely, and also to track the car’s metrics, location, and possibly even passenger load. The mandate was included under the pretext of helping to cut down on drunk driving while also preventing high-speed chases from occurring.
Such backdoor kill switches work through cars being continuously connected to wireless networks. Many, if not most, new cars (and virtually all electric cars) already come standard with wireless capability. Indeed, General Motors pioneered in-car (internet) connectivity more than a decade ago.
It is possible that the law could be challenged or repealed by a future federal government, as privacy issues with the mandate are glaring and obvious.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Cybersecurity
Your Vehicle Black Box: A ‘Witness’ Against You In Court
Marina MedvinFormer Contributor
I write about constitutional law, criminal law, and privacy.
Jan 8, 2019,11:40am EST
Odds are your vehicle is equipped with an Event Data Recorder, also known as a vehicle black box. And, your local police department is now fully equipped to retrieve and analyze the black box data and use it against you in court.
As of May 2018, almost all common US vehicles come standard with a black box installed. That means that every time you get behind the wheel, every button you press and every maneuver you make is being recorded. The data is stored in the black box to be readily accessible after collisions, such as seatbelt closure, brake usage, blinker usage, travel speed, etc. All of this information, once retrieved, will either corroborate or contradict your account of what happened. If you’re lucky, your story is bolstered, if not, your credibility is shot. If you wanted to remain silent and limit the evidence the government can use against you in a criminal prosecution, you’re out of luck when your car’s black box does the talking for you.
In civil litigation, this data will help to determine the course of events and may help to determine which vehicle was responsible for the collision. In criminal investigations, the black box may incriminate or exculpate the accused.
Around since the 90s, black boxes were mostly used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to gather statistical data, but not in court. It the last few of years, local police slowly began using black boxes in criminal cases.
After a deadly collision in Georgia, Victor Mobley was charged with two counts of vehicular homicide, reckless driving, and speeding. Mobley was accused of driving at a speed of 97 miles per hour in a 45-mile-per-hour zone as he collided with another moving vehicle, resulting in a crash that killed both passengers in that vehicle. Police obtained data from Mosley’s black box without a warrant. The data included airbag deployment, engine speed, brake status, throttle position, engine revolutions, driver’s seat belt status and brake switch status, as well as time from maximum deceleration to impact, time from vehicle impact to airbag deployment, and diagnostic information on the vehicle’s systems. The prosecutor relied on Mobley’s black box data to prove the government’s case against Mobley. Mobley was subsequently found guilty on all counts.
Mobley appealed his case to the Court of Appeals of Georgia, arguing that he had an expectation of privacy in his vehicle’s black box data and that the Fourth Amendment shielded this data from police search and seizure without a warrant. In 2018, the court opined, based on the type of data retrieved by the police, a search warrant was not required. The data was not private, the court reasoned. Any member of the public can observe a vehicle’s speed or see whether the driver is wearing a seatbelt. This is not the type of information that is guarded by the Fourth Amendment, the court reasoned. But the court limited its ruling to this particular set of facts, acknowledging that as technological capabilities of vehicle black boxes broaden, so too must protections for the information they will store. “[We] caution law enforcement officers faced with an investigative need to obtain data from a vehicle’s ACM to err on the side of caution by obtaining a search warrant before retrieving that information,” the court concluded. Two judges wrote concurring opinions to double down on the message to law enforcement: get a warrant.
In a similar case in Florida that happened a year prior, after a high-speed collision that killed his passenger, Charles Worsham was charged with manslaughter and vehicular homicide. The black box in Worsham’s vehicle recorded speed and braking data, the car’s change in velocity, steering input, yaw rate, angular rate, safety belt status, system voltage, and airbag warning lamp information. Police obtained the black box data without a warrant and attempted to use it in their case against the driver.
Worsham argued that he had an expectation of privacy in his vehicle’s black box data and that the police should be prohibited from using the information against him when they obtain it without a warrant. The Florida Court of Appeals agreed and ruled in direct contrast to the Georgia case. The Florida court understood the black box as a type of constant, unrelenting surveillance. They also considered the difficulty, expertise, and precision required to obtain and interpret the data stored in the black box.
The information contained in a vehicle’s black box is fairly difficult to obtain, and the data retrieval kit necessary to extract the information is expensive. Moreover, each car manufacturer’s data recorder requires a different type of cable to connect with the diagnostic port. Plus, the downloaded data must be interpreted by a specialist with extensive training.
Furthermore, the Florida Court of Appeals reasoned that while some of the data collected by the vehicle black box was in public view, not all of the collected data was available to the public. And that private data belonged to the driver, not to the government. As such, Worsham was entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy in his black box data, and police were only entitled to retrieve it after obtaining a warrant explicitly permitting them to do so.
Other than a likely outdated opinion from a California Court of Appeals on this issue, there are no other appellate court opinions on this subject matter. This is because we are in the infancy of black box litigation. The drastic divergence between the Georgia and Florida opinions on whether a warrant was required for police to obtain the black box data is a good indicator that this fight over black box data privacy may end up in the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, both Florida and George have made it clear: police have a simple avenue to use the black box data against the accused when a warrant is secured.
However, all of this litigation over warrants does not cover an essential flaw in reliance on black box data in the first place: the data provides an incomplete picture of what really happened and allows the jury to give too much weight to the information jurors interpret as a smoking gun. Black boxes, under current design, retain only a few seconds of vehicle activity in memory. That means that driving behavior that occurred immediately prior to the start of the recording is omitted from evidence a jury will be able to see. If you were driving at the speed limit for the duration of your trip but had to suddenly accelerate in an attempt to avoid a collision or in response to a trigger event, it is the acceleration and your response that will be recorded while your prior calm driving will be off the record. Black boxes are thus dangerous “witnesses” in court, and drivers will feel significant pressure to waive their 5th Amendment rights, take the stand and testify to fill in the holes.
In 2019 and beyond, we can expect to see increased courtroom usage of black box data. But as the analysis of the data becomes easier and cheaper for law enforcement, the cost to defend a case with black box data will become higher for the accused. The more your lawyer will need to do, and the more experts that you will need, the higher your litigation costs will rise.
“Auto companies love these mandates.
They comply and get to charge what they want for the extra stuff to a captive consumer.”
All vehicle Insurance carriers want these trackers.
Many carriers give vehicle owners rate discounts for voluntarily having mileage trackers installed.
This is why so-called smart guns are being hyped. A gun tied to some sort of rfid chip technology would be subject to signal canceling manipulation. Stroke of the pen and all smart guns become paper weights.
Many Freepers are too young to remember when the Government mandated seat belt interlock.
I bought a new 1974 Chevrolet and it was a PAIN IN THE ASS to have to lift my ass off the seat to start the car each time so that I didn’t have to connect the seat belt.
1974: Seat Belt Starter Interlocks Piss Off More People Than Watergate Scandal
By Murilee Martin on February 12, 2011
While I do think that the early 1990s produced some great cars, the US government-mandated automatically-deployed shoulder belts of the era (for vehicles without then-optional airbags) were utterly maddening. When the mechanisms went bad— as they often did— you had no shoulder belt or, perhaps even worse, a belt that deployed and retracted constantly during a drive; I experienced this once in a Mazda 323 and was hoping for a quick, painless nuclear war to remove me from the planet by the end of the drive. However, the American driving public had become mostly pro-seat-belt by that time, what with the debunking of the “you want to be thrown clear from the wreck” myth, and public outcry over automatic belts was limited to some minor grumbling. This was most definitely not in 1974, when all new cars and light trucks sold in the United States featured DOT-mandated interlocks that prevented engine starting unless driver and front-passenger belts were fastened; widespread outrage blowtorched the ears off of every congressman in the country, and the House killed the starter-interlock requirement late in the year.
I was 8 years old at the time, and because my parents had no ’74 model-year vehicles (having purchased a ’72 Chevrolet Beauville passenger van and a pair of ’73 Fiat 128s just before the fateful year) I wasn’t aware of the starter-interlock feature; I do, however, recall the godawful seat-belt buzzers in the Fiats, which would be triggered whenever the car hit a bump (my horror/fascination with such buzzers led to an unfortunately incident with the Alameda County Bomb Squad about a decade later). It was when I started driving and wrenching on terrible beater cars in the early 1980s that I encountered the nightmare of the starter interlock; most of my car-equipped peers were driving hand-me-down Malaise Era subcompacts— Colts, Pintos, Corollas, and Vegas were most popular, because their parents had been counting the minutes until they could finally pawn off those much-loathed heaps on the young’uns— and I had to hot-wire around the interlocks in a couple of my friends’ 1974 machines to get them to start at all. Mike Davis wrote up a pretty readable piece on the subject for The Detroit Bureau, but I suggest slogging through this dry-as-Mojave-sand academic piece on the subject. The numbers paint a vivid picture: 7% of drivers of buzzer-equipped 1973 vehicles in the study wore lap and shoulder belts, while 48% in the ’74 vehicles buckled up… and, no doubt, plotted revolution (the other 52% must have gone straight to their mechanics and had their interlock systems disabled, or else they unfastened their belts as soon as the engine got going). So, what do we learn from this? Nanny-state big government forcing their evil plans down the throats of the population, with Brezhnev and Nader chuckling evilly in the background? Or a population too goddamn stupid to protect themselves? Both?
Posted in History
Tagged as 1970s, 1974, Legislation, Malaise, Malaise Era, Safety, Safety Legislation, seat belts
I think we all better read that.
Does anyone not already think this is going on?
Just like there was an intense public debate about turning cell phones into mandatory tracking devises, where you cannot turn off the tracking... not.
It is almost as if the ruling class decides what they want to do, without our consent. /S
Years ago, discussions of vehicle remote control and mysterious crashes preceded by uncontrollable acceleration, resulting in death of Clinton whistle-blowers, was “debunked” as conspiracy theory.
___________________________________________
I remember that discussion included a specific patent for the remote control that was owned by . . the Clintons.
And in other news...
A Pennsylvania man is accused of drunken driving after police said he operated an Amish horse and buggy in a “reckless manner,” authorities said.
>> Read more trending news
Ray Byler, 20, of Sigel, faces a misdemeanor charge of driving under the influence and was also cited for careless and reckless driving, WJAC-TV reported.
Airplanes too.
The final straw that caused Donald Trump to run for President was the death of a certain charismatic young man died in a mysterious private plane “accident”.
We need a freedom hackers group working against these types of tracking devices. Slogan could be something like “hack and live free”.
Sign me up.
The Georgia Supreme Court promptly granted cert. and reversed the Court of Appeals in 2019. Police have to get a warrant to access onboard vehicle data.
And as I recall there was a “near miss” with a Senator or Representative when his private plane’s engine died in flight. He did a deadstick landing and survived.
The good news is I’ll never buy a new car... They’re just computers on wheels so hacking into one can be done now anyway.
The infrastructure bill passed with the help of these nineteen Assistant Democrats.
Dan Sullivan (R-AK) Trump endorsed
Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) Trump endorsed
Mike Crapo (R-ID) Trump endorsed
Roy Blunt (R-MO) Retiring
Richard Burr (R-NC) Retiring
Deb Fischer (R-NE) Trump endorsed
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) Trump endorsed
Rob Portman (R-OH) Retiring
Thom Tillis (R-NC) Trump endorsed
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) being primaried by Trump endorsed candidate
Jim Risch (R-ID) Trump endorsed
Chuck Grassley (R-IA) Trump endorsed
Bill Cassidy (R-LA) Trump endorsed
Kevin Cramer (R-ND) Trump endorsed
Roger Wicker (R-MS) Trump endorsed
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) Trump endorsed
John Hoeven (R-ND) Trump endorsed
Susan Collins (R-ME) Trump endorsed
Mitt Romney (R-UT) Trump endorsed
We will NEVER Make America Great Again by re-electing Assistant Democrats.
Trump has to stop endorsing them.
What about the 19 GOP Senators and 13 GOP House that voted for it?
A list that provides a clear reason for why the 17th Amendment needs to be repealed.
No problem, no one will be able to purchase a new car after Biden tanks the economy.
They should commit as well. Demand answers. Get real journalists.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.