When it comes to the assault on our constitutional rights. Big Brother rarely launches a full-blown frontal attack because the intention is too obvious. Instead, the strategy most often used is one that mirrors the advice Screwtape gave his nephew Wormword in the C.S. Lewis novel, The Screwtape Letters.
“Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
Evidence of the effectiveness of this tactic are found everywhere in America today, most notably in the aftermath of 9/11 where in the name of “safety” we’ve witnessed liberty dying a slow and painful death. More recently, in response to several mass shootings, our Second Amendment rights are gradually being chipped away.
It’s easy to point a finger at Democrats and the Far-Left for our loss of liberty, but the reality is that Republicans have worked hand-in-hand with them to lead us down the road to tyrannical hell. We need look no further than the Patriot Act, which brought us the NSA spying program Trump wants to make permanent, along with a bucket list of gun-control legislation from the GOP to see how this is true.
One liberty-killing program that’s been on the gradual road to Hell for several years now has been Big Brother’s goal of creating ways to track Americans in their cars in real time.
An early attempt to reach this goal made the news in January 2015 when Obama and the GOP-controlled Congress empowered the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to create a national database of license plates and driving habits of Americans. Though originally created to combat drug trafficking, the program was being expanded to track other “criminals” and was even made available to state-level law enforcement agencies.
The expansion continued in January 2018 when Trump and the GOP gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database in the name of immigration control.
But the expansion isn’t finished. A bill was recently introduced in the House that will facilitate the creation of a real-time national driver surveillance program that makes it possible for law enforcement to know anything and everything about a driver at the click of a button.
Known as the “Safe Drivers Act” (SDA), the bill’s primary purpose is to make everything a motorist has done available to law enforcement NATIONWIDE, and it will accomplish this feat by tracking driver’s licenses in addition to license plates.
Does your driver’s license have a star on it? It does in every state but Oklahoma and Oregon as part of the REAL ID Act, a program launched by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2005 to improve airport security. This post-9/11 legislation effectively laid the groundwork for national IDs and driver’s licenses . . . just a hop, skip, and a jump away from legislation like the Safe Drivers Act.
SDA will “incentivize” states — code for bribing them with taxpayer-funded grants — to modernize their computer systems in such a way as to make it possible for states to all work together and make real-time driver information available to one and all.
By the way, Honda, Ford, General Motors, BMW, and Renault are testing a radical new system that “assigns digital IDs to individual autos, linked to information such as ownership and service histories. This data covering the lifetime of the vehicle would be used to recognize cars on the road, allowing for fees to be paid automatically by the owner with no need for the specialized tags required in current electronic toll collection systems.”
Don’t worry, I’m sure Big Brother won’t use this as another way to spy on Americans. Besides, who needs biometrics for automobiles when you can have biometrics for people?
David Leach is the owner of The Strident Conservative.
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