[pazra]

One thing I find surprising is that most geeks seem to be all for Self-Driving cars, yet are heavily against government surveillance. Yet self-driving cars are not only going to offer up much more surveillance data, but also offer a potential 'kill switch' backdoor that would allow nefarious agencies to drive you into a brick wall at 80mph and make it look like an accident.

Once manual cars go away completely, you will not only loose control of your data, but also the certainty that your motor vehicle isn't going to act against you.

[s_q_b]

If the security services target you, and truly wish to kill you, current methods will more than suffice.

The Israelis like magnetic mines, the Russians polonium, the Yanks... Well to be perfectly honest I'm not sure, but it almost certainly involves some combination of clandestine airpower, special forces operations, OCO, and morbid obesity.

Right now, the chain of devices that can track and kill you is enormous, from your router to your standard ICE Jeep. You're most likely already being tracked on traffic camera, the electronic toll system, cellular towers, passing Wifi, and the endless set of embedded Linux devices that you don't even consider.

If you are targeted, there may be many obstacles to your removable from the board, including political, economic, or legal ramifications.

But technical means will not be one of them.

[hx87]

> the Yanks... Well to be perfectly honest I'm not sure,

I'm not sure either, but setting up a traffic accident wouldn't attract too much scrutiny today.

[s_q_b]

I fully agree. The crux of my argument is that self-driving cars aren't inherently any more hackable or trackable than existing vehicles with existing available data connections through cell, emergency communications, OTA updates, or usb if local.

One could, in theory, use the fly-by-wire steering, traction control, or ABS systems to simulate a pretty convincing crash. It would be fairly straightforward electronically through the onboard processors in existing cars, and would be practically untraceable.

[pbreit]

Yes, I would say a car that can do anything from centrally provided instructions is inherently more hackable than a car that is disconnected from everything and can't do much more than keep its speed on the highway.

[s_q_b]

That's beside the point. The question of centrally distributed updates is orthogonal to that of self-driving cars.

[pbreit]

I'd be surprised if any of the self-driving cars are not "online".

[acchow]

> The Israelis like magnetic mines, the Russians polonium

I don't understand how either of those work, but they don't sound discreet. The ability for a state to assassinate people at will and make it look like an accident is entirely different from "yeah, but the government could also shoot you with a drone at any moment".

[s_q_b]

The magnetic mines are exactly what they sound like. Someone drives by on a motorcycle, slaps an explosive on the side of a vehicle, and drives away. Not very subtle, but apparently very successful in taking out Iranian nuclear scientists.

Polonium is actually fairly clever. It's a radioactive material that acts as a slow-moving poison.

It took a while for Western physicians to diagnose, so many domestic leaders, political dissidents and even foreign heads of state (Arafat may have been killed in this manner) fell victim to it.

[coldpie]

I'm a proponent of self-driving cars, but I do really struggle with this. Nefarious governments are one concern, but my larger concern is the complete joke that is computer security in 2016. For the most part this means the worst case is people lose some private data; bad news, certainly. But car companies have already proven they can't handle security, and now we're building Internet functionality into cars. What happens if some sociopath like Auernheimer decides to kill a few people for laughs?

[icebraining]

Will they kill more than 16000 per year? Because that's how many it would take to make it worse than today, even assuming that self-driving cars only halve the current numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

[Kadin]

I agree with you, but I have confidence that those security issues can be resolved -- by just removing the network connections, cellular backhauls, etc. if necessary -- while the alternative represented by the status quo has basically ceased improving.

We've spent decades with passive, and more recently active, safety improvements, and the results have been good ... but in the last few years the rate of improvement in fatalites-per-mile has tapered off. It seems that all the low-hanging fruit is basically gone from that particular tree, and we may well be pushing into a zone where cars are perceived to be safe enough that further safety improvements might lead, perversely, to less safe behavior (the "football helmet" problem). At the very least, making modern manually-controlled vehicles significantly more safe seems like a very serious challenge.

On the contrary, we know that autonomous vehicles can be much more safe than manually-controlled vehicles, just by virtue of not being run by a person who may be drunk, high, emotionally impaired, tired, distracted, medically incapable of driving, etc. Right there you remove a bunch of leading causes of crashes. Given our failure to eliminate those problems completely (we made some progress on drunk driving, sure, but not much on the others, IMO) given decades of effort, we should consider that building secure computer systems might be a more tractable problem.

It will take a lot of effort to ensure that the car manufacturers don't do obviously boneheaded things (like allow over-the-air software updates), but I have more faith in our ability to quickly fix machines than to change human behavior.

[FrancoDiaz]

The "kill switch" is more likely a way to control the movement of the population. With the flip of a switch, whatever areas can effectively become "no-go" zones.

Surveillance will probably be a big factor too. The government will surely know who's in the car and where they're going...all in the name of "safety" or something.

It's no wonder that government types are so gung-ho for this...all in the name of "safety" of course.

[icehawk219]

To be honest I'm less concerned with nefarious governments, since they already have countless ways to track you and kill you if they really want to. And for the most part these days they don't even have to be discrete about it because of how little ability people have to push back.

I'm more concerned about what corporations are going to do when they have complete control over your movements. Especially with someone like Google getting in on it. They'll have control over what information you have access to, your communications, all your data, and now also your ability to move around. And once they have this data the US Government (at least) will have complete access to it too.

Although to be honest I'm even less concerned about that then I am the big problem. What happens when our countries economy completely collapses because a huge chunk of the current workforce is no longer needed? And I'm not talking utopian UBI day dreaming solutions. I mean real, tangible, short term solutions to dealing with 20%+ unemployment? In a country that can't even get behind something like universal healthcare ...

[Kadin]

> I mean real, tangible, short term solutions to dealing with 20%+ unemployment? In a country that can't even get behind something like universal healthcare ...

We'll do the same thing we did in the 30s when unemployment threatened to become socially destabilizing: we'll create work for those people. Either in the form of some WPA-ish scheme, or mandatory military/national service, perhaps. In the US it will likely be the former, because there's a sort of social collective memory of the concept in the context of the Depression. Having done it once basically greases the skids involved in doing it again.

What I think people don't really appreciate is how mild recent "depressions" have been relative to the 1930s; we haven't seen 20+% unemployment in this country since WWII, so lots of things seem politically impossible. They aren't; it's just that the necessary conditions for them don't exist right now. But if we were facing the same set of problems again, there's no reason to think that we wouldn't reach for the same set of solutions.

Though personally, I don't see any of the automation technologies that are on the horizon right now leading to 20% unemployment. Most automation technologies have typically underperformed expectations in terms of headcount reduction, with niche exceptions in certain industries. I suspect automation will follow that pattern: you'll see a few industries or job functions get decimated (long-haul truck drivers, potentially), a bunch of new jobs get invented (remote backup driver, automation systems technician, etc.), and a bunch of other jobs get reshuffled, expanding or contracting based on costs (lower transportation costs might lead to more shipments, more need for loading/unloading workers, supply chain management types, etc.). Plus, the time horizon on many of these systems is approaching a significant fraction of a person's career. Someone in middle age, driving an OTR truck today, probably won't have too many problems riding that particular horse all the way into the sunset of their retirement (although at the end of their career they might feel a bit like John Henry, looking for those particular jobs that the machines have a hard time with). Someone who's 18 and looking for a career ought to beware, though. And it would be fair to ensure that public funds for education and job training are matched to expected job availability in the future -- it seems too often that we train young people for jobs that are on the verge of disappearance, and then blame them for taking the bait. That obviously shouldn't happen.

[ocdtrekkie]

I suppose this depends. If you have open source technology that isn't reliant on a cloud service to figure out how to drive, potentially we could be okay. Though a lot of companies are treating cloud tracking as a given right now.

[Retric]

Self driving cars are no easier or harder to track than normal cars. They don't need constant over the air connections to some central server, so it's just the standard license plate readers or built in tracking systems.

PS: On star does everything your suggesting and it's already in million of US cars.

[okwhatthe2]

Agreed. Security technologies are about to become front-and-center the way quality control of food and engineering are. Transparency is key

[trynumber9]

At least in my country if the government wanted to kill me they could do it with or without self-driving cars.

[astrocat]

Very rarely to things have upside with no downside. "Geeks" are clearly aware of both the upside of autonomous vehicles, and the downsides presented by advanced, always-connected tech and the monitoring that comes with it. Thus, the advocacy for privacy, strong encryption, no backdoors, and the fight against government surveillance is the responsible approach to advocating for a bright, advanced future where tech serves us, rather than consumes us.

[gopi]

The chances of CIA killing you in a self driving car is much much less than you killing yourself in an accident on a manual car

[ybrah]

Last I checked every move I make is tracked by my phone's GPS anyways