Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Oh, of course not, this will NEVER be abused,

or used to track people, or anything else.  Nooo....
The European Union is secretly developing a "remote stopping" device to be fitted to all cars that would allow the police to disable vehicles at the flick of a switch from a control room.
Oh, just to shut a car off during a chase?  Doesn't sound that bad...
But wait!  There's MORE!
Confidential documents from a committee of senior EU police officers, who hold their meetings in secret, have set out a plan entitled "remote stopping vehicles" as part of wider law enforcement surveillance and tracking measures.
That sounds more like the 'turn it off' is just an option of the REAL functions, doesn't it?



4 comments:

Marja said...

At least here they also want to start taxing driving by kilometers, which would require fitting every car with a device which records not only those kilometers but also tracks every vehicle and its location the whole time. Yay. Lots of grumbling against it, I hope the resistance works this time, but I'm not holding my breath. The end result is probably going to be that a) that comes to pass, bye bye that shred of privacy and b) we are not even going to get rid of any of the old taxes.

Firehand said...

I think it's Oregon wants to put such a device on cars; people are driving less and newer vehicles get better mileage, so they're not getting as much money from gas taxes so "Let's tax people by how much they drive!" Their problem is both "Another tax? Screw you!" and that even a lot of the leftists don't like the tracking idea.

markm said...

It's a terrible idea, quite aside from the tracking aspect. A cop wants the car he's chasing stopped, so he calls in the license plate number, the dispatcher types it into a computer - and _somewhere_ a car loses propulsion, power steering, and power brakes. Real crooks will switch license plates, or disguise the numbers with tape - so they'll be unaffected, while somewhere else, there's an honest citizen whose car suddenly died in the middle of freeway traffic... Even when it's a simple traffic stop, the cop might read the number wrong, or the dispatcher might type it in wrong.

Windy Wilson said...

What Markm said. If this were proposed under a Republican President comics such as SNL would have weeks of material satirizing the proposal merely by presenting the results Markm described.