By Eric Peters
Eric Peters Autos
March 23, 2026
I've written several columns about how new and late model vehicles equipped with what's styled "connectivity" - the capability to send and receive data, like a smartphone and not necessarily with your knowledge or consent - are being used to create real-tme records of your comings and goings and many other things besides.
Well, now we know it's not just the corporatocracy - the vehicle manufacturers, the insurance mafia, etc. - that's mining your data. It is also the FBI. "The FBI is buying up information that can be used to track people's movement and location history," according to Politico, which quoted FBI Director Kash Patel as follows:
"We do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us," Patel said during testimony before Congress last week.
Italics added.
"Commercially available" sounds innocuous - like commercially available stuff you might pick up at the Dollar Store. It's the available part that's not-so-innocuous. It is not "available" in the sense that the owner of something puts it out there for people who might be interested in buying it. Like a For Sale sign taped to a car's windshield by its owner, to indicate he's wanting to sell his property. What Patel is talking about is the property - your data - that is being taken from your vehicle and sold to other parties (such as marketing firms that want to know more about you so as to be able to fine-tune their pushy selling to you, as well as the insurance mafia, so they can more effectively mulct you) without your consent or even knowledge.
"Commercially available" sounds innocuous - like commercially available stuff you might pick up at the Dollar Store. It's the available part that's not-so-innocuous. It is not "available" in the sense that the owner of something puts it out there for people who might be interested in buying it. Like a For Sale sign taped to a car's windshield by its owner, to indicate he's wanting to sell his property. What Patel is talking about is the property - your data - that is being taken from your vehicle and sold to other parties (such as marketing firms that want to know more about you so as to be able to fine-tune their pushy selling to you, as well as the insurance mafia, so they can more effectively mulct you) without your consent or even knowledge.
There is a an important difference there.
You buy a new vehicle and you think - reasonably - that you are now the owner of the vehicle. For this word to have any substance, it must be the case that no other person or party can obtain data collected by your vehicle without your explicit prior authorization. Even people who rent apartments have a legal right to privacy; i.e., the landlord cannot just enter the renter's apartment any time he wants to and filch through his tenant's desk drawers or have a look at his tenant's computer's history. Were he to do that, it would e considered a crime.
More finely, if he were caught doing that, it would be considered a crime.
Well, it is common knowledge the vehicle manufacturers mine - and sell - data collected without people's explicit consent and now it's been revealed they provide this data to the federal government's primary law enforcement agency. They have been caught, in other words. Yet no one has been charged, much less arrested.
Again.
Isn't this astounding ? Isn't it a measure of the extent to which the people of this country have been beaten down, psychologically ? A quarter century has passed since Nahhhhhhhhhnlevven and the subsequent conditioning of Americans to accept living in a panopticon that encompasses everything, just about - including their vehicles.
No one asked them whether they wanted to "share" - what a vapid and treacly term - their "data" with anyone. It was just "shared."
Oh, of course, the guilty will say that when someone buys a new vehicle, they agreed to all of this. It is right there, in the fine print. Never mind no one reads that fine print. Never mind that the manufacturers (as well as the dealership sales staff) know no one reads it - and that they depend on that fact. They certainly don't tell people they really ought to read it - or why. Just sign here.
It's a form of suborning "consent" - as happens when you "agree" to submit to DWI breath testing (and thereby agree to provide evidence that can and will be used against you) when you "agree" to get the driver's license the state requires you to get in order to be legally allowed to use what used to be the public right of way and exercise wat was once your right to travel freely.
Well, never mind all that.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon is among the few who appear appalled. He - along with Senator Mike Lee of Utah - want to make it illegal for the FBI and other law enforcement entities to buy your "data" from those who stole it. "Doing that without a warrant is an outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment," Wyden says. "It's particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information."
It'd be even better if it became a crime to steal it in the first place.
Naturlich, there are defenders of this buying what someone else stole, such as Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He says "The key words are commercially available. If any other person can buy it, and the FBI can buy it, and it helps them locate a depraved child molester or savage cartel leader, I would certainly hope the FBI is doing anything it can to keep Americans safe."
A better summary of the Stage 5 metastasis of America into a Homeland would be hard to write.
Cue the Lee Greenwood song.
Meanwhile, if you want to drive a vehicle that isn't something like a an ankle bracelet with wheels, buy one that was made before vehicles got "connected." A good way to know whether a vehicle is - or is not - is to see whether it has a shark fin antenna on the roof. If it does, it is. If not, it probably isn't. Most vehicles made before 2005 or so are safe.
Most vehicles made after about 2015 or so so are not.
This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.