In its breathless coverage of how Tesla and Elon Musk “helped crack the Cybertruck explosion case”, the Telegraph inadvertently reveals a stark truth that should alarm anyone concerned about fundamental civil liberties. The report lauds the role of Tesla’s data in the investigation, noting how the wealth of information transmitted by the vehicle allowed “Tesla employees and investigators to establish the cause of the explosion and where the vehicle had travelled from”.
It goes on to explain that “using information from Tesla’s charging stations, police were able to retrace the car’s journey from Colorado to Las Vegas”.
Then comes the slippage – the part that, until now, no mainstream media organisation has been prepared to say out loud. It should give us all pause.
For years, those of us raising concerns about the implications of such technology have been dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”, “right-wing reactionaries”, or “disinformation pedlars”.
Yet here, in black and white, is an admission of a profound shift in how mobility – freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, the right to the city, freedom to roam – is being reconfigured at the interface between digital technology and the Big State in what are still (albeit nominally) liberal democracies:
Just a few years ago a vehicle’s manufacturer would have been of little help to law enforcement, particularly once a vehicle had rolled off the production line. However, advanced modern vehicles are able to provide a stream of real-time data that can prove crucial to police investigations.
The admission is all the more stark precisely because it slips out inadvertently, almost naively, in the Telegraph’s perfectly understandable excitement at the idea that technology like this could one day prevent horrific crimes. But what, I wonder, do we lose in return?
The petrol engine, for all its inefficiencies, represented a kind of freedom – a mechanical embodiment of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘negative liberty’, the absence of external interference. You started the car, you drove, and, a few fleeting outposts of the state notwithstanding, you were an untracked vector, your movements your own, your autonomy unchallenged.
But as the Telegraph inadvertently makes clear, the electric car revolution has little to do with sustainable living or environmental stewardship. Instead, it heralds an era of unprecedented surveillance and control, cloaked in the language of progress, of caring, of being kind, of saving the planet. The real innovation here is not in cutting emissions but in enabling the incursion of the state, the regulators, the snoopers, the bureaucrats, into what were once private domains.
Today, the tracking of a terrorist’s movements may seem an unambiguous good. Few would argue against using such tools to prevent the loss of innocent life. But once this infrastructure exists, the potential for abuse becomes glaringly obvious. It’s no great leap to imagine a future where certain individuals – those deemed undesirable for reasons both legitimate and arbitrary – find their mobility curtailed; their vehicles remotely disabled for “the good of the community”, for Gaia, for the NHS, for 15 minute cities.
In this brave new world, the car no longer represent freedoms, but subjugation. The very tool that once symbolised autonomy instead tethering us to networks of surveillance, regulation and control.
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Executive Director of Communications and Research at the Free Speech Union.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Funny how these things slip out as technological triumphs. Do you remember how the would-be Trump assassin was named within about half an hour by tracking his (father’s) gun on a database that is actually illegal under US law.
Of course that was all technology could do, because it has proved totally impossible to trace his footprint on the internet.
I thought that it was the bicycle, not the car, that first brought freedom to the masses.
Tracking via Tesla charging stations is not so different from using a credit card at a filling station which has CCTV to ensure that you don’t fill up then flee.
It’s the data logging in the modern car that provides the constant surveillance to, potentially, worry about.
Anpr cameras on every major road, facial recognition in city streets…
The future’s here, and it’s just like communist China, but without the cheap energy.
I thought facial recognition cameras were a breach of privacy, at least until recently. What happened to data protection when during 2020 Lockdowns, or ‘circuit breakers’ when, if you went into a pub (I only went through peer pressure and the experience was off putting with all the arrows, complete circus)! they would ask you to leave your mobile number at the bar.
Oh how I loved leaving my number at a bar/restaurant when i was in the UK in 2021. I always gave my Thai number with one digit wrong. The look on their faces was superb!!!!
I worry about both the data gathered in the car (sat nav, miles done etc) and outside it (the credit cards and CCTV etc).
I saw a drone hovering above my local Tesco the other day, I gave it a wave!
Yes and we have ANPR over here. The tracking is not that exceptional. How about mobile phone tracking? You can’t even walk for freedom, etc. Let’s just get on with things as they are and stop confecting panick from perfectly normal and reasonable use of technology. Furthermore, driving has never been free, it’s a social thing, you don’t build your own roads, so follow the rules.
Don’t build them, but do pay for them.
Of course, Mobile phone masts is what closed the case on the Huntley killer, but from what many have learned since 2020, the Government are not your friend, quite the reverse. Malign I’d say.
As long as you have a smartphone in your pocket you are being constantly surveyed.
This is true, however it is possible to make your smartphone as invisible as possible through turning off many of the “helpful” functions of it and disabling much of the google/ios functionality to the point where only core functions necessary for basic operability are enabled. There is a lot of information available on how to do this. Your device will, of course, still be trackable from phone tower “pings”, etc., but it is possible to preserve some degree of privacy.
Yes when I had mine from new, I never downloaded any updates and still have not despite getting it on my screen from time to time that can get annoying.
I don’t like the “we’re already screwed as it is” argument.
It just means more to fight against if society ever woke up and wanted to start rolling some it back.
Like that short dystopian Australian movie where his car won’t start even after he did the breathalyzer test to start the car, because some old lady sent an instant photo of his passenger dropping litter. Right there is the zero trust dystopia we’re heading into.
To be fair to that firm, it is not just them that uses modern ways of capturing information, and it’s a bit over the top to criticise it’s existence. It’s more to do with what it’s used for. After all, many modern cars have gadgets that can do some of the classic “black box” data capture in some situations, then there are sat-nav services, like the Mapbox/MyT (Toyota) product that stores a lot of travel records and transmits them to your iPhone etc if you let it.
And as someone else says, for fuel you would have to pay cash somewhere, maybe an old one that does not use cameras for security etc. Welcome to paranoia.
The ability to track a car has absolutely nothing to do with the powertrain.
The so-called Internet of Things is neccesarily a giant surveillance engine because many of these things are little more than real-time data collection devices which send everything they record to huge data centers for analysis and decision-making. The things also need constant monitoring and ability to update or change their software at any time for everything to run smoothly most of the time. In this respect, any modern car will enable the car maker (or whoever else controls the software its running) to perform the same feat Tesla did for this Tesla, regardless of the type of engine it uses.
Tracking everyone’s movements because a tiny percentage of these everyones will commit serious crimes certainly doesn’t seem like an unambiguous good to me. Especially as the members of this tiny minority will soon learn how to avoid this surveillance.
Films that come to mind….Equilibrium, Demolition Man, V for Vendetta.
I don’t believe this story for a minute. Some of these plays are mildly plausible but this one is an exercise in incongruity. Just like the New Orleans guy where they let some reporter into his house to walk around and touch everything a few hours after the event including bottles of suspicious substances. If you can’t see the obvious problems here then you probably have no business even thinking about these things because that is what they want. People like you getting all worked up about them.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DEbMQ0APw7h/?igsh=aTc1dGdvdnl6b2hu
AI facial recognition glasses… whatever next.
When people praise the freedom the car gives, they ought to bear in mind that this is exclusively freedom for adults, for which the price is paid by children, who, compared with what they enjoyed within living memory, are now prisoners in not just neighbourhood enclaves but homes and gardens (when the have gardens).
It has nothing to do with whether it is a BEV or ICE automobile. Most modern cars have cellular network or satellite connectivity and communication. The cell phone in your pocket even provides tracking your movements with great accuracy.
It seems to me after reading the comments the real concern is not the technology that enables this, it is the mistrust of our government and it’s bureaucracies that have access to this data and what they will use it for. The whole covid debacle exposed the outright malfeasance, tyrannical abuse of power and self-serving corruption of our government agencies and has driven our great mistrust of the ruling elite.