The California bureaucrat behind a big brother plan to track vehicles and “tax by the mile” worked as a government transportation planner in the former USSR. Hasan Ikhrata, Executive Director of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), who told the Los Angeles Times “This really is a must for our nation. It is not a matter of something we might choose to do,” worked for the Moscow Metro Corporation, according to his official SCAG biography. SCAG foresees mandatory tracking of all California motorists by 2025. A black box tax-by-the-mile pilot program is underway in Oregon and several other states. Not only does this help separate us from the wealth we create and punish the mobility that is seen as a threat by authoritarians, but it will allow NSA types to keep tabs on where we go. Meanwhile, back in runaway statism’s motherland, Ikhrata’s former employer Moscow Metro announced plans in July to track the movements of individual passengers on subways by tracking the SIM cards in their mobile phones, even if the phones are powered off, according to RT. Something similar will be coming here soon no doubt — unless it is already embedded in the zillions of pages of ObamaCare or Dodd-Frank. Although Ikhrata no longer spends his days working as a Moscow planner, he appears to have imported into California’s sprawling bureaucracy an instinct which runs unchecked inside the iron machinery of the world’s most authoritarian governments: track, surveil, and ultimately control everything citizens do. No need to import that mentality. If only we could export it.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 03:22:05 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015