Sorry Mr. Franklin, we couldn't keep it.

Via A Trainwreck in Maxwell, there is this story about a government bureaucracy calling for electronic means of allowing all cars to "talk to each other," the idea being to avoid accidents.

This seems to connect to the earlier call by our government to legally require a "black box" in every car so that your every movement can be tracked.  This is from 2011, but as the article states, even then almost every new car already has the equivalent of a black box already installed by the manufacturer.

  "The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Friday proposed long-delayed regulations requiring auto manufacturers to include event data recorders - better known as "black boxes" - in all new cars and light trucks beginning Sept. 1, 2014. But the agency is behind the curve. Automakers have been quietly tucking the devices, which automatically record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop, into most new cars for years.

NHTSA estimates that 96 percent of all 2013 model year cars already have event data recorders as standard equipment.

When a car is involved in a crash or when its airbags deploy, inputs from the vehicle's sensors during the 5 to 10 seconds before impact are automatically preserved. That is usually enough to record things like how fast the car was traveling and whether the driver applied the brake, was steering erratically or had a seat belt on."

Given how other government institutions like the IRS have been politicized, can it be very long before the government can determine in real time, and store forever, every where your car goes, and what it does, and then use it against you if it wants?

In reality, this is just one more way to exert control over all of us, the peons, by our overlords in bureaucracies everywhere.

They will simply mail you your traffic ticket if you speed or don't make a full stop.  No traffic cameras needed. Imagine all the money the government can extract from our pockets! Go to someplace you shouldn't, and they will have a record.  If the voters elect a purely corrupt government, kinda like the one we have now, then what is to stop the authorities from simply creating evidence against you using this?

Couple this with the monitoring of all of our electronic correspondence, monitoring our mail, our telephone calls, the demand for private, encrypted passwords, and watching us in our backyards with drones, and there isn't very much that we can do without a government employee knowing about it, and making a determination of whether something should be done about us.  It's a new world out there, and not a very good one.

A government that can't trust it's own people is a government that can't be trusted with power.  Let's hope that somewhere, somehow this trend can be stopped, although I think that it is very likely too late for us.

Update:  Via USA Today, and with a hat tip to Glen Reynolds, there is this:

National security officials have tried to make it sound as if their intrusions are modest, testifying they used the authority to “query” particular phone numbers just 300 times last year from a database of tens of millions. But for each number queried, analysts may go out two or three “hops.” This means an analyst will look at everyone a target has called (the first hop), then at everyone those contacts have called (the second hop) and then at all the numbers called by those contacts. With all this hopping, the National Security Agency has likely looked at the communication patterns of millions of people, the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer testified last week. This bears closer scrutiny.

The administration has overplayed the effectiveness of its approach, initially testifying that the phone program and another that involves international e-mails had helped disrupt “potential terrorist events over 50 times since 9/11.” When pressed, however, it turned out that the e-mail program has been most successful in thwarting terrorism; the phone database “contributed” to understanding 12 events and not necessarily to preventing them.

The administration and its allies have underscored the oversight provided by congressional intelligence committees and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But lawmakers on the committees are muzzled by their oaths of confidentiality. And the court operates in secrecy, hearing only the government’s side.

This is grossly excessive, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., hinted this week that there is more still that has not been disclosed.

A month ago, just a handful of senators was warning that the security programs had gone too far. With more than 200 House members joining the chorus, the program might finally get the intensive public review that it so badly needs.

When did we the citizens of this country vote to allow the government to intrude into every communication we make, and watch every single thing that we do?  Never, and don't say we did when we ask the government to keep us secure from terrorism.  That job can be accomplished far more efficiently by watching people prone to terrorism, not every one of us. 

No, throughout history, it has proven to be the case that those in authority seek to gather more and more power to themselves, at the expense of everyone else, until there is tyranny.  Our nation was founded in as way to try to stop that, and leave the power with the people.  To accomplish this, the founders stipulated to the necessity of keeping government small, indeed as small as possible, and that the electorate must be educated enough in their plan to keep it that way.  Both seem to have fallen by the wayside over the last 80 years or so, and now we are perhaps beyond the point where we can call ourselves free; where the government belongs to us, and not the other way around.