The noose tightens on our freedom. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:
“A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power.”—Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
If we haven’t learned by now, we should beware of anything the government insists is for our own good.
Take the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Given the deteriorating state of the nation’s infrastructure (aging highways and bridges, outdated railways and airports, etc.), which have been neglected for years in order to fund America’s endless wars abroad, it would seem like an obvious and long overdue fix.
Yet there’s a catch.
There’s always a catch.
Tucked into the whopping $1 trillion bipartisan spending bill is a provision requiring automakers to prescribe a “federal motor vehicle safety standard for advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology, and for other purposes.”
As Jason Torchinksky writes for Jalopnik:
It’s pretty clear that the goals of this section of the law are to reduce drunk driving fatalities and crashes via still-undetermined technological tools that somehow are able to “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired,” and/or “passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the blood alcohol concentration described in section 163(a) of title 23, United States Code,” and if either or both of these conditions are proven to be positive — if the car thinks you’re drunk, then it may “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation.”
As expected, the details are disconcertingly vague, which leaves the government with a wide berth to sow the seeds of mischief and mayhem. For instance, nowhere does the legislation indicate how such a so-called “kill switch” would work, what constitutes a driver who is “impaired,” and what “other purposes” might warrant the government using such a backdoor kill switch.
