Your car is a surveillance target

Orwell-creep continues as we learn that over 2 million cars purchased with subprime loans are outfitted with GPS-based kill switches that can be used to turn off your vehicle if your payments are late. Cars have been killed in dangerous neighborhoods, at stoplights and while driving on a freeway. If you’d like details on the how and why of these devices, check out the story in today’s Salon.

My concern is the ever-advancing tentacles of the corporate state winding their way into our private lives. If I had written a blog a year ago saying I believed cars were having kill switches installed I would have been laughed at as another conspiracy nut. But here you are. Kill switches in cars. Today the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA and other government agencies are deeply entrenched within the corporate world and are constantly developing new ways to insert themselves into our lives.

It doesn’t take a very vivid imagination to see where this is going. There will be a day when all cars not only have kill switches, but will be built with technology that allows the government to track them, listen in on conversations and, ultimately, take control the car. All of this will come under the auspices of fighting crime, in the same way that the war on terror lead to massive illegal surveillance.

The American security state is out of control. With little regulation and the ability to make up the rules as they go, the NSA, CIA and others wipe their boots on the Constitution as they develop newer and more devious ways to embed themselves deeper into your private life.