Thread: Big Brother’s Track And Tax: Govt Pushes For Black Boxes To Monitor All American Vehi

Big Brother’s Track And Tax: Govt Pushes For Black Boxes To Monitor All American Vehicles

Posted by Andrea Ryan on Monday, October 28, 2013, 7:21 PM


It’s a double bonus for the government. They get to track you and tax you.
Americans may be monitored soon by a black box device that will track an individual’s mileage, then transmit the personal information to government bureaucrats. So they can tax you. Some states, such as Oregon, California, Minnesota, and Nevada are eagerly embracing pilot programs.
The ACLU of Nevada is alarmed and concerned that the black boxes will be “full-fledged tracking devices” that would “keep records of individuals’ everyday comings and goings.” Good. So is the rest of Americans who value liberty.
According to the L.A. Times,

WASHINGTON — As America’s road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.

The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America’s major roads.
The usually dull arena of highway planning has suddenly spawned intense debate and colorful alliances. Libertarians have joined environmental groups in lobbying to allow government to use the little boxes to keep track of the miles you drive, and possibly where you drive them — then use the information to draw up a tax bill.
The tea party is aghast. The American Civil Liberties Union is deeply concerned, too, raising a variety of privacy issues.
And while Congress can’t agree on whether to proceed, several states are not waiting. They are exploring how, over the next decade, they can move to a system in which drivers pay per mile of road they roll over. Thousands of motorists have already taken the black boxes, some of which have GPS monitoring, for a test drive.
“This really is a must for our nation. It is not a matter of something we might choose to do,” said Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which is planning for the state to start tracking miles driven by every California motorist by 2025. “There is going to be a change in how we pay these taxes. The technology is there to do it.”
The push comes as the country’s Highway Trust Fund, financed with taxes Americans pay at the gas pump, is broke. Americans don’t buy as much gas as they used to. Cars get many more miles to the gallon. The federal tax itself, 18.4 cents per gallon, hasn’t gone up in 20 years. Politicians are loath to raise the tax even one penny when gas prices are high.
“The gas tax is just not sustainable,” said Lee Munnich, a transportation policy expert at the University of Minnesota. His state recently put tracking devices on 500 cars to test out a pay-by-mile system. “This works out as the most logical alternative over the long term,” he said.
The U.S. Senate approved a $90-million pilot project last year that would have involved about 10,000 cars. But the House leadership killed the proposal, acting on concerns of rural lawmakers representing constituents whose daily lives often involve logging lots of miles to get to work or into town.
Several states and cities are nonetheless moving ahead on their own. The most eager is Oregon, which is enlisting 5,000 drivers in the country’s biggest experiment. Those drivers will soon pay the mileage fees instead of gas taxes to the state. Nevada has already completed a pilot. New York City is looking into one. Illinois is trying it on a limited basis with trucks. And the I-95 Coalition, which includes 17 state transportation departments along the Eastern Seaboard (including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida), is studying how they could go about implementing the change.
The concept is not a universal hit.
In Nevada, where about 50 volunteers’ cars were equipped with the devices not long ago, drivers were uneasy about the government being able to monitor their every move.
“Concerns about Big Brother and those sorts of things were a major problem,” said Alauddin Khan, who directs strategic and performance management at the Nevada Department of Transportation. “It was not something people wanted.”
As the trial got underway, the ACLU of Nevada warned on its website: “It would be fairly easy to turn these devices into full-fledged tracking devices…. There is no need to build an enormous, unwieldy technological infrastructure that will inevitably be expanded to keep records of individuals’ everyday comings and goings.”

Hat tip: Steve

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013...ican-vehicles/

Federal government planning black box vehicle mandate to track, tax and even remotely control all personal vehicles

Sunday, October 27, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: vehicle black boxes, mileage taxes, remote control

(NaturalNews) The federal government is working on a plan that would mandate black box tracking devices be installed in every vehicle, with real-time uploading of vehicle location, speed and mileage to government authorities. This Orwellian technology is already technically feasible and will be promoted as a way to increase "highway safety" while boosting government revenues from mileage taxation.

"The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America's major roads," reports the LA Times.

"[Congress is] exploring how, over the next decade, they can move to a system in which drivers pay per mile of road they roll over. Thousands of motorists have already taken the black boxes, some of which have GPS monitoring, for a test drive."

There are three hugely important realizations to glean from all this:

Realization #1) The government wants to track your every move

The USA is already an admitted surveillance state. As leaked documents from Edward Snowden have revealed, the NSA openly spies on all your phone calls, text chats, web surfing behavior, bank account activity and more.

Now, the government wants to add real-time tracking of your vehicle location to that long list of surveillance targets. This would of course allow the government to:

• Track and map all your driving trips.

• Know when you are home or away from home.

• Know where you work.

• Establish patterns of your activity such as when you pick up kids from school or go grocery shopping.

• Know if you attend political rallies, activist meetings, gun ranges or other destinations the government characterizes as being linked to "domestic terrorism."

The government could then use this information to target you for punitive tax audits, surprise armed raids, government shakedowns or other nefarious schemes that are have now been revealed as routine extortion activities carried out by a criminal government. (See video, below.)

Realization #2) Government can turn EVERY road into a toll road

Both state and federal governments absolutely love the idea of taxing you for every mile you drive. This fits into the "government utopia" of taxing you for breathing (carbon dioxide taxes), taxing you for working (payroll taxes) and even taxing you for dying (estate taxes).

Of course, governments already indirectly tax driving by taxing fuel. If you wanted to tax driving, taxing fuel is actually a very efficient way to do it. But the rise of electric vehicles is starting to freak out governments because they don't have a way to tax the actual road mileage of vehicles that don't burn gasoline or diesel.

Because governments inherently believe that all your money already belongs to them, they perceive electric vehicles as a source of "lost revenues." These lost revenues diminish the power and wealth of government while also limiting the amount of money that can be awarded to wealthy donors via no-bid contracts (such as the $600 million no-bid contract to build the failed Healthcare.gov website).

As a result, governments are drooling over the idea of using vehicle black boxes to tax you for every mile you drive, effectively turning every road into a toll road. Watch for this to start out as a very small tax to be more easily embraced by the public (maybe a penny per mile) and then get ratcheted up to $1, $2, or even $5 per mile in some areas.

Realization #3) Two-way communication allows government to control your vehicle

Black boxes don't have to be only one-way communication devices. They can also receive commands from government authorities such as commands to:

• Shut down your vehicle and disengage the starter, effectively stranding you with no way to drive.

• Lock you inside your own vehicle, trapping you until "authorities" arrive.

• Cause your car to drive off a cliff as a method of assassinating political enemies, then blaming it on their "bad driving."

• Cause your vehicle to run over pedestrians, thereby earning you a prison sentence for "vehicular manslaughter." (Yet another way to dispatch political enemies.)

• Through two-way black boxes, the government can even use coordinated vehicle control to do things like build a highway roadblock from 10 cars, cause a massive 50-car accident, or even drive a stream of heavy trucks through the walls of a family residence in an effort to kill a journalist.

It's no joke that two-way black boxes allow the government to turn your vehicle into a weapon while simultaneously compromising your freedom of movement. Through black boxes, governments can transform your car -- once a symbol of freedom -- into a rolling prison cage which may be used to imprison you, harm you or harm others.

Imagine, too, what happens when hackers seize control of the government's vehicle control system. They could then turn cars against each other and, with all the drivers trapped inside, turn America's roadways into a deadly demolition derby... (although, it's worth noting that most hackers actually have a greater sense of ethics than government, and the only hackers who might engage in such behavior would probably be Chinese hackers engaged in acts of war against America.)

The U.S. government is now a criminal mafia extorting money from the citizenry

We already know the U.S. government has become a criminal enterprise that uses extortion, intimidation, threats and even acts of violence against the American people to command their compliance. This has just been made frighteningly clear by a new book called Political Extortion by Peter Schweizer.

This is a must-read book that reveals the true criminal nature of the federal government and how governments use mafia-style tactics to extort money from the public in order to fund the lavish lifestyles of bureaucrats and politicians.

Watch Schweizer's interview with Lou Dobbs here:



http://www.naturalnews.com/042690_vehicle_black_boxes_mileage_taxes_remote_co ntrol.html#

Black Boxes In Cars Could Help Government Replace Fuel Tax With Pay-As-You Drive Scheme (While Tracking Your Location)

October 29, 2013 by Ben Bullard

PHOTOS.COM

Right at the nadir of public opinion over the government’s abuse of surveillance power comes a fresh story about cars, black boxes, real-time location surveillance and government tax collectors. It forecasts a near future when private cars will be equipped with data recorders that tell the government where you are, how you’re driving, and how much you should pay in road usage taxes.
The Los Angeles Times reported over the weekend on a new push for government to consider mandating the devices in all cars so that the tax man can “track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats…”
Oddly, the Times appears to use the story to drive some kind of wedge between the tea party and libertarians – two groups that, despite the blurring of their ideological boundaries at the edges, share a fair amount of overlap.

Libertarians have joined environmental groups in lobbying to allow government to use the little boxes to keep track of the miles you drive, and possibly where you drive them — then use the information to draw up a tax bill.
The tea party is aghast. The American Civil Liberties Union is deeply concerned, too, raising a variety of privacy issues.

Something sounds slightly…off. Libertarians for a surveillance state and innovative taxes? It will take more effort for media to redefine terms like “libertarian” if the intent is to create unfounded emotional responses from the public. Nonetheless, the plan evidently has the support of Reason’s vice president of policy, who sees the scheme as a less-unfair pay-as-you-go usage assessment on motorists.
Leaving that aside, the move toward black boxes in cars is being helped by a pilot program in Minnesota, where the State placed the devices in 500 cars to test a pay-per-mile fee system. And that program pales in comparison to a stalled effort by the U.S. Senate, in 2011, to allot $90 million for a wider pilot project that sought to deploy 10,000 similarly-equipped cars. The House killed that plan.
Notwithstanding the fact that the 18.4-cent Federal gas tax already washes the Appropriations budget with highway funds, pundits point to the higher fuel efficiency of modern cars, along with the absence of political will to raise the gas tax, as two reasons for the stagnation of the Federal Highway Trust Fund. Of course, the government is grasping not at reforms in spending existing highway dollars efficiently, but in finding new ways to ensure revenue growth by adopting a different taxation model for road infrastructure.
From the story:

“This really is a must for our nation. It is not a matter of something we might choose to do,” said Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which is planning for the state to start tracking miles driven by every California motorist by 2025. “There is going to be a change in how we pay these taxes. The technology is there to do it.”

By all means, if the technology is there to do it, then it must be done. Is that the argument?
Some transportation policy planners see black box programs like Minnesota’s as the future of Federal transportation funding. “The gas tax is just not sustainable,” said UM transportation policy expert Lee Munnich. “This works out as the most logical alternative over the long term.”
Sure. But more likely is a scenario in which one new tax doesn’t simply replace an old one, but rather augments it. Taxes, fees and tolls aren’t readily repealed by governments, which always seek out visionary ways to conceal the total cost of tribute from the people, who passively sustain governments by failing to resist integral confiscation schemes.
The black box plan has a long way to go before becoming a standard, but if it takes root, it will become one of the most convenient confiscation schemes our government has yet devised. Along with Obamacare, which asks far too much personal information from private citizens, the black box model would also become one of the most egregious invasions of Federal government into private life, potentially paving the way for the Feds to extract far more from law-abiding motorists than mere taxes.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Privacy, Staff Reports


http://personalliberty.com/2013/10/2...your-location/

Black Boxes to Track and Tax the Miles You Drive? Judge Napolitano Weighs In

Video at the Page Link:

FROM FOX AND FRIENDS //OCT 29 2013 // 10:07AM
AS SEEN ON FOX AND FRIENDS

Imagine this: a black box in your car tracks how many miles you drive, then the government taxes you based on the total. It could become a reality someday, with some states looking to test out the idea with the hope of eventually bridging revenue shortfalls.

The federal government may also try to move in this direction, with analysts saying taxes on gas purchases aren't generating enough money anymore. The government says more tax revenue is needed to maintain highways.

Judge Andrew Napolitano stopped by Fox and Friends this morning to take on what he sees as yet another example of the drive toward Big Brother policies.

He disputed the notion that drivers would instantly benefit from the tax in the form of highway improvements, arguing the revenues would actually go to the "general treasury of the state" like any other tax.
"To say we need the black box so that drivers pay their fair share of using the highway is ridiculous. ... It's just more money for the bureaucrats to spend," he said.

Napolitano says states have seen the federal government get away with "spying on everybody under the sun," and now the states "want their piece of spying."

The judge says Americans need to look at stories like this and think about the fundamental question of whether they want the government watching "everywhere we go and everything we do."

Watch the full interview and tell us what you think of this new idea. Video at the Page Link:

POSTED IN: // Mileage tax // Taxes // Judge Napolitano // Black boxes in cars // Big government

http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/10/29...olitano-weighs