Category Archives: Op-Eds

Op-Eds

The Self-Driving Dilemma: Safety versus Freedom

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RGBStock.com Car Wreck

A new study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute examines the difference between regular automobiles and the new “self-driving” models. According to the study (commissioned by an admittedly self-interested party, Google) humans behind the wheel crash 4.2 times per million miles, self-driving cars only 3.2 times per million miles. And the self-driving era is in its infancy. As the new cars improve, pass regulatory scrutiny and gain wider adoption,   tens of thousands of lives could be saved every year in the US alone.

But even assuming the validity of the study’s findings, self-driving cars are not necessarily without their problems. Given government’s growing interest in controlling how and where Americans travel, they could become just another piece of our ever more pervasive surveillance state.

Above and beyond immediate, local situational awareness — staying on the road, keeping track of the distance from and speed of surrounding cars, etc. — self-driving cars need constant awareness of the larger environment: Where they are on the map, what turns to make to get where they’re taking you, and whether or not there are accidents, traffic jams or road repairs ahead.

While any single piece of this information might be available from a number of sources, it’s easier to get everything from one source: A network to which the car either remains connected at all times, or connects to frequently when driving. And this is a two-way street (pun intended!). The car requests information from the network … and  takes instructions from the network too.

This fact creates all kinds of opportunities for abuse by government agencies with command influence over the network.

Something going on your government doesn’t want you to see? The network says there’s been a train derailment and routes all traffic so as to detour around the area.

Someone your government DOES want to see? When she gets in her car to go to work, the doors lock, she finds that she cannot turn off the engine, and she’s driven straight to the nearest police station.

I’m sure you can come up with other dystopian possibilities.

Widespread, even universal, adoption of self-driving cars is probably inevitable, and probably a good thing. It’s important that we don’t lose site of priorities other than safety and convenience, though. The market should demand, and government should be powerless to forbid,  a driver prerogative of assuming manual control of his or her vehicle at any time, for any reason.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Disband and Defund the Touchy, Stealy Administration

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A TSA officer inspects a piece of luggage. Source: Wikipedia
 

“Inappropriate.” “Invasive.” That’s how Kevin Payne of San Diego, California describes a Transportation Security Administration employee’s “patdown” of his daughter Vendela at the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina airport. He’s unduly kind. The “patdown” — which Payne captured on cell phone video — was a sexual assault which, in any sane society, would have ended with the perpetrator’s arrest.

The TSA’s response? The assault “followed approved procedures.” Turning every airport terminal in the US into the functional equivalent of one of Uday Hussein’s “rape rooms” is apparently a feature, not a bug, in America’s post-9/11 “security” software.

It’s time and past time to permanently disband TSA and let airports and airlines go back to providing for their own security.

After 13 years of operation, with an annual budget of nearly $7.5 billion, the TSA has yet to demonstrate its usefulness in stopping terrorism aboard airplanes. It routinely fails tests in which inspectors smuggle weapons past its security checkpoints. So far there’s been not a single verifiable instance of TSA foiling a terror plot. And it’s invariably local law enforcement, not TSA, which  effectually responds to security incidents at airports (as in the 2013 LAX attack, in which a TSA agent was killed before local airport police shot the gunman, and the 2014 New Orleans incident in which a deputy sheriff shot a man who was chasing a TSA agent with a machete).

The only thing the organization appears to be any good at is empowering its employees to ogle and feel up travelers and steal goodies from travelers’ luggage.

As for the costs, that $7.5 billion budget doesn’t even begin to touch them. According to the US Bureau of Transportation statistics, there were 685 million airplane passenger boardings in the United States between October 1, 2014 and September 2015. Assuming an average wait time of 10 minutes to get through the TSA’s screening line, that’s 1.1 million hours of lost time for passengers — hours they could have spent working, or shopping, or getting to where they were going, instead of waiting to find out whether or not they’d win the TSA lottery to have their genitals fondled or their laptops swiped from their checked luggage.

Yes, I get it. 9/11 was a horrible day and the urge to “do something” to prevent future attacks is entirely understandable. But the Transportation Security Administration is clearly not up to the task. It doesn’t make us safer. It just inconveniences, assaults and steals from us.  Let’s end this nonsense.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

“Gun Control” — Can Someone Please Make That Man a Ham Sandwich?

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Gun photo from RGBStock

On January 5, US president Barack Obama unveiled his first major policy action of the new year: A  batch of new victim disarmament — or, as its supporters  call it, “gun control” — measures which he intends to impose by executive order.

The response from Republicans in Congress is, pardon the pun, weak tea. They merely accuse him of “executive overreach,” claiming that the powers he claims lie with Congress, not the presidency. He retorts that the orders are “well within [his] legal authority.”

Both sides are wrong. The language of the US Constitution’s 2nd Amendment is clear and its intended meaning is well-documented. The framers of that amendment — who had just emerged from a long war against the world’s most powerful army, a war won by an armed citizenry — understood the right to keep and bear arms as a right “of the people.” They specifically and intentionally barred the president, Congress, the state legislatures, your local city council, ANYONE, from infringing it. Every “gun control” law now on the books is unconstitutional and therefore, per Madison v. Marbury, void.

Not only is Obama’s executive order sortie, taken in conspiracy (“consultation”) with the Attorney General of the United States and other government functionaries, not within his legal authority, it’s a crime.

Under US Code Title 18, Section 241, “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same … They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section … they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.”

I’ve heard it said that a grand jury will, if asked to do so by a prosecutor, “indict a ham sandwich.” Is there a prosecutor and a grand jury in the US brave enough to bring Barack Obama, Loretta Lynch and their co-conspirators before the bar of justice?

Probably not. But with 300 million guns in the hands of 100 million Americans, it’s unlikely that this regime’s attempted depredations can be made effective. Like Walt Whitman said, “resist much, obey little.”

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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