Just Like Daniel Boone

Trey Smith

Your chipper TV friend Flo, otherwise known as Progressive’s ubiquitous shill, wants you to be excited — very excited. As you’ve probably learned from her gratingly effervescent commercials, she and her Big Brothers in the insurance biz want you to see the latest Orwellian scheme not as a privacy-destroying step to justify raising your government-mandated car insurance premiums. Instead, she wants you to see her “patented, proprietary” device “from the future” as a great innovation aimed at saving you money.

And yet, as the federal government this week takes a big step toward possibly mandating “black boxes” for new cars, and as more car firms like Progressive pressure you (and potentially soon require you) to put tracking bugs in your vehicle, serious questions are now swirling around so-called “telematics-based insurance” — questions that Flo doesn’t want you to ask. She purports to have all the answers, shrouding this complex surveillance system in her squeaky voice, wide smile and promises of car-insurance utopia — almost as if she were deliberately parodying the saccharine avatar of an autocratic mega-corporation in a dystopian sci-fi flick. But despite the TV ad barrage, the questions nonetheless persist because the tracking system is both so invasive and so arbitrary.
~ from Big Brother Takes to the Wheel by David Sirota ~

We Americans find ourselves staring at a weird dichotomy. On the one hand, under the leadership of the Bush and Obama administrations, the workings of OUR government are more and more slipping behind a thick veil of secrecy. Heck, our government now has a secretive panel that can decide if you or I will be rubbed out and we won't be able to challenge their decree BECAUSE WE WON'T KNOW ABOUT IT until it's too late.

On the other hand, OUR government -- in conjunction with amoral corporations -- are devising more and more ways to keep a watch on all of us 24/7. We already know that many of the companies who create and market cell phones and other such devises have included GPS tracking capabilities in their products. Now the auto insurance industry wants to get it on the act!

As Sirota makes clear in his column, Corporate America has no qualms about this nefarious strategy because they can utilize it to gouge more money out of consumers. OUR government won't stand in the way of the corporate financial pig out because this technology benefits them even more.

Daniel Boone was known for his ability to track almost any animal or person. Boone did it with almost no technology at his disposal. In the near future, OUR government will become just as adept as Boone in tracking whatever they want for whatever reason they want and there won't be a damn thing any of us can do about it!