THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING! Or… maybe not.

Believe it or else, there were opponents to air bags, seat belts and child safety restraints.

Some time, someone will oppose everything… even vanilla ice cream and Mother’s Day.

There are, I suppose, several ways to consider the following.

One could presume the psychotic Chicken Little, paranoid delusional “the-sky-is-falling” approach, or, one could suppose the device is only an extension of someone who cannot tell a lie… or, at least is very difficult to deliberately fabricate falsehood.

And then, there’s something in the middle.

I would imagine that’s where the truth resides.
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A Black Box in Your Car?

By Sam Favate, April 23, 2012, 1:40 PM

If you thought having EZ Pass in your car would make it too easy for the government to track you, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Senate passed a bill in March that calls for “mandatory event data recorders” (or black boxes) to be installed in all new passenger motor vehicles, starting with the 2015 models, and which would record data before, during or after a crash, according to KurzweilAI.net.

The bill, which can be seen here, has a privacy provision but gives the government the authority to access the black box in a number of circumstances, including court order, consent of the owner, an investigation or inspection, or to determine the need for emergency responses.

The same bill would allow the IRS to revoke passports of citizens accused of owing more than $50,000 in back taxes, according to PrisonPlanet.com, a website of radio show host Alex Jones – described by Rolling Stone as “a giant in America’s conspiracy subculture.”

The connection between black boxes and passport revocation has Jones in a lather.

Citing biometric face-recognition technology and transdermal sensors that prevent an inebriated person from driving a car, Infowars.com – another of his websites — suggests that a system could be established that would force every driver to get permission from the government to drive, once an iris scan determined their identity and good standing with the IRS.

The bill — known as “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act,” or MAP-21 — obviously doesn’t get into such speculation. But it does provide some additional rules that many might consider a good thing, including one barring “electronic screens from displaying broadcast television, movies, video games, and other forms of similar visual entertainment that is visible to the driver while driving.

Noticeably less paranoid is the website KurzweilAI — run by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil — which wonders what effect the legislation will have on upcoming advances such as augmented reality displays on windshields.

Or, one wonders, on Google’s self-driving cars, which are approved for testing in Nevada.

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http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/04/23/a-black-box-in-your-car/