As You Drive, So You Are Watched

The Justice Department’s plan may be legal, but it’s politically unacceptable.

Another day, and another of Leviathan’s tentacles is exposed for all the world to see. This time the culprit is the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the target is the American motorist. The Wall Street Journal has the scoop:

The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents.

The instant reaction to this news has been mixed. As might be expected, the civil libertarians have cast the measures as the latest chapter in America’s slow descent into ubiquitous security theater. Before long, they have proposed, we will be living in Richard Brautigan’s country; still free in many ways, yes, but living our lives on camera rather than in camera, and raging impotently as we are woven slowly into an irreversible “cybernetic ecology” and “all watched over by machines of loving grace.” The government is spying on cars? Naturally. And soon they will have graduated to ankle bracelets, and then . . .

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