New York State To Motorists: All Your Info Are Belong To Us
I want to depart from our regularly scheduled programming and comment on a story which will affect tens of millions of people in the imminent future, but will nevertheless fly completely under the radar.
Beginning next month, all motorists who wish to travel through the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel or Queens Midtown Tunnel in New York City will have no choice but to hand over their location data to the government. Previously it was possible volunteer this information by way of “EZ Pass,” which motorists can purchase and install in their vehicles. However, those who wished not to utilize “EZ Pass” had the option of paying the old fashioned way, by handing over U.S. currency to attendants.
But now New York State is instituting a brand new “innovation” for these various crossings. No longer will there be any option available for those who’d prefer that the government not indiscriminately collect their data. As of January 2017, anyone traveling these bridges and tunnels will be forced forfeit their information by way of “scanning devices” which indiscriminately suck up the license plate information of every vehicle passing through.
Thus decrees King Cuomo II: “Customers who do not pay their tolls are subject to $50 violation fees, car registration suspensions, and other enforcement actions.”
Oh really? What “other enforcement actions” might those be? We can only guess! What a wonderful surprise, I’m sure all such actions will be conducted extremely professionally and won’t be unduly burdensome in the slightest.
This sounds like the stuff of a dystopian prison state, not a benign toll-collection program:
At each crossing, and at structurally sensitive points on bridges and tunnels, advanced cameras and sensors are being installed to read license plates, regardless of lighting conditions or the vehicle’s speed. Every vehicle that passes through a MTA bridge or tunnel will have their license place scanned, and the technology will instantly cross-check the vehicle’s license plate number with the list of suspended registrations and send an alarm to the on-duty Trooper and Bridge and Tunnel Officers in a matter of seconds.
Got that? So it’s not solely about toll collection. Whether your registration is up-to-date has nothing at all to do with collecting tolls. This program gives law enforcement authorities additional opportunities to interface with motorists, even if they are suspected of committing no crime, at which time officers can check for any number of petty “violations.” You can be sure that a significant portion of the resulting “stops” will produce vehicular searches, warrant checks, and frivolous arrests. It would be bad enough if this kind of authoritarian framework were being instituted purely to collect revenue, but it clearly goes well beyond that.
What this constitutes is bulk, indiscriminate data collection (Hello, NSA) and motorists who wish to use the Queens-Midtown Tunnel as of next month will have no choice but to give over their data. Increasingly, to drive a car on public roads is to forfeit one’s liberties, with no options available to shield the details of one’s movements from the prying eyes of the government. But we’ll be told not to worry — because history definitely tells us that there is no potential for abuse when state officials amass vast amounts of private information on citizens without any discernible oversight.
Another reason this won’t be widely perceived as a civil liberties infringement is because many of our media elites are not regular drivers. They do not commute to work by getting in their car and driving through traffic in the morning. The New York City subway is a marvel of human achievement, but it doesn’t lend itself to empathizing with the daily routines of most Americans. When you get on the subway you retain your Constitutional right to not be searched without probable cause. When you get in a car, you increasingly agree to relinquish this right. More and more, the Constitution ceases to apply when you’re behind the wheel. I went into greater detail about this in a 2014 VICE article, which probably needs an update soon:
That all said, a large portion of even the New York City population actually does own cars, so they’re being adversely affected too. Many New York City residents have to drive through these crossings for work — delivery drivers and the like. They’re the ones getting hammered by this. Out-of-towners not intimately familiar with the workings of New York State toll collection protocol are also in for a rude awakening.
You know how every so often, video surfaces of a (typically black) guy getting shot during a traffic stop gone bad? The prudent policy response to this problem would be to reduce the number of traffic stops to which motorists are superfluously subjected. A toll violation shouldn’t be cause for a traffic stop conducted by an armed agent of the state; neither should an expired registration. It just increases the likelihood that something will go disastrously wrong.
The dearth of attention paid to these civil liberties-shredding measures is one reason why I highly recommend joining the National Motorists Association. It’s a more independent and effective advocacy organization than AAA (“Triple A”), which colludes with various industry, insurance, and government interests. I’m not much of a “joiner” but I do make sure to renew my NMA membership each year.
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