In a bid to stop drunk driving, the federal government is planning to force manufacturers to install a “kill switch” in cars.

From American Institute for Economic Research. In November 2021, former US Representative from Georgia Bob Barr wrote a little-noticed political column claiming that buried inside President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure legislation was a dangerous provision that would go into effect in five years.

View Comments (2)

Have you taken your place on the wall?

“Marketed to Congress as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving, the measure will mandate that automobile manufacturers build into every car what amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch,’” wrote Barr, who was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president in 2008.

Like most Americans, I had never heard of this alleged “kill switch” until a few days ago when Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican, proposed to strip the mandate’s funding. …

Nineteen Republicans joined all but one Democrat in opposing Massie’s amendment, which failed.

True or False? 

The claim that the feds would mandate that every new motor vehicle include technology that could disable the vehicle seemed ludicrous. So I started Googling.

To my relief, I saw several fact-checkers at legacy institutions had determined the “kill switch” mandate was not true. …

Unfortunately, my relief evaporated once I looked at the bill itself.

Sec. 24220 of the law explicitly states: “[T]o ensure the prevention of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities, advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor vehicles.”

The legislation then goes on to define the technology as a computer system that can “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle” and can “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected” (emphasis added). …

“No Mention in the Bill of a ‘Kill Switch’”

How fact-checkers determined the “kill switch” narrative to be false is odd, especially since the articles don’t deny Barr’s central claim: The legislation mandates a computer system that will monitor driving performance and be able to disable motor vehicles. …

To arrive at their conclusion that this car-killing mechanism is just a fantasy, fact-checkers resorted to sleight of hand. A common tactic was to debunk social media posts that were actually false or unfounded, like the popular claim that the systems would be required to alert law enforcement if the drivers were deemed impaired. …

‘Secure in Persons and Effects’? 

The unpleasant truth is that lawmakers slipped into a massive spending bill a mandate that stands to require all new vehicles to have AI-driven technology that can disable your vehicle if the technology determines you’ve had one beer too many. And fact-checkers are using headlines to make it sound as if the legislation does no such thing. …

The True Purpose of the Surveillance State

Then again, maybe Americans wouldn’t care if they knew about federal legislation that mandates tech to disable their cars if it suspects that last glass of wine — which you may or may not have had — put you over the limit.

As Robert E. Wright has pointed out, once upon a time, Americans considered spying an invasion of privacy, but those days are mostly gone. Increasingly, many take an “I have nothing to hide” approach. …

The United States is not a totalitarian state, but its growing efforts to control information — which have grown more obvious and ambitious — show that it’s not a neutral bystander, either. Those in government have their agendas, and they are not known for playing nice with those who cross them (just ask Edward Snowden and Julian Assange).

Which brings us to the raison d’être of mass surveillance.

“The asymmetry of the surveillance state belies its true purpose: to protect the government, not the people,” writes Wright.

Once one understands this, it becomes clear why many see grand potential in a law that requires every single new motor vehicle in the country to be monitored and potentially disabled by a computer — and why rent-a-cop fact-checkers would go through such contortions to downplay this dystopian mandate.

Share this article to keep people informed.

(Excerpt from American Institute for Economic Research. Photo Credit: Evgeny Tchebotarev on Unsplash)