“States Mull Taxing Drivers By Mile/a” drew my attention yesterday, though I did not post it. I didn’t think it would come to anything potentially worrisome quite so quickly. And really, it isn’t a necessarily bad idea on how to bring in taxes. It is less objectionable than the “hidden” tax on gasoline that we currently pay. I dare say, most people, myself included, would be hard pressed to state with any degree of certainty how much of a gasoline tax they pay; this proposal would avoid that evil as you would necessarily have to pay it in some other form than as part of the built-in price of gasoline. That being said, if I were the one implementing it, I would probably settle for a longer timetable in introducing it and base it on a recording of your odometer every inspection. That’s already every one to two years, so we could just have you pay your mileage tax at that time. It would be potentially very unfair to people who spend a meaningful amount of time off-road, but I am unsure that the current system is substantially more far for this class of driver.

“Healey proposes using GPS to protect abuse victims, gang crime witnesses/a” however brings immediately to the forefront the kind of action that I foresaw the global positioning system being used for when I first read the above article. The same risks are of course built in to the OnStar™ system. We do not want to give Government this sort of control over our lives. We do not want to trust government to sufficiently obscure the signals being used so that only the government can track us. Remember the lack of privacy in “Minority Report”? The potienal for being tracked? The difficulty in changing your “key” when it is a biometric? GPS systems are not quite so bad, you can ditch a device afterall. But the same sort of risks are there. The system that lets a government track a criminal lets businesses and, as technology grows cheaper and more prevelent, eventually individuals track track him also. And as people grow accusomed to tracking each other, eventually all of us. The California article is one way this will come to be, all of us being tracked to tax our milage. The RFID concerns documented well by EPIC/a and EFF/a represents another avenue for pervasive survalence to enter our lives.