They say it's a security concern. They're right:
Now, the US Commerce Department is set to enact a de facto ban on most Chinese vehicles, by prohibiting Chinese connected car software and hardware from operating on US roads, according to Reuters.
The rationale? National security concerns. "When foreign adversaries build software to make a vehicle [connected], that means it can be used for surveillance, can be remotely controlled, which threatens the privacy and safety of Americans on the road," said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
"In an extreme situation, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States all at the same time, causing crashes, blocking roads," said Secretary Raimondo, a scenario we saw depicted in Fate of the Furious (where it caused me a headache), as well as more recently (and to better effect) in Leave the World Behind.
Yup.
Now I expect there's a whole lot more behind this and the security risks are just nice window dressing, but it's pretty hard to argue with this.
5 comments:
IIRC there was a Clive Cussler book about a Japanese company that made self-driving cars and exported them to America. The manufacturer had some grudge against the US and was going to use his self-driving cars to position nuclear bombs at various places around the US without the hassle of involving self-sacrificing human drivers or dupes. I wonder if the import control weenies read that book.
None of that's an issue with my'86 Toyota pick up.
It's immune to pretty much everything but an EMP, RPG or other ballistic, inertial, mass impact incidents...that cause dents. It may be slow, but it's ugly and "there's one more thing, I got the pink slip, Daddy!"
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Much better to see to it we have a nation of vehicles only controllable by Uncle Sugar, who will always have out best interests at heart. and never, ever, ever use our own means of transportation against us, surveil us with them, limit our travel, and vacuum up all information they aggregate concerning our movements, our whereabouts, our habits, what radio stations we listen to, and our actual real-time conversations inside those micced and internet-accessible vehicles, nosiree.
"Cuz they'd never ever do anything like that to us.
Your late-model car is a cell phone.
Period.
Treat it accordingly.
@Aesop
Beat me to it. This is because the Chinese won't share the output of their spyware with the US IC. Pretty much the same thing with banning Kaspersky.
It's fine when our own government does it, but somehow terrible when China does it.
Gangsters absolutely hate it when other gangs encroach on their turf.
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