alt Hacker News>>Is this merely adding a device to a criminal’s vehicle?
For the topic of the post, YES
The article was specifically about laws allowing a JUDGE to add a device to a specific convicted person's vehicle for a limited time.
OF COURSE there is the slippery-slope argument you describe very well.
The slippery slope danger is real, and I've stated that I oppose any motion down it.
But I also oppose posts which wrongly scream that we have already slid down it entirely when in fact the article is about taking a single limited step down the slope.
Descending every slippery slope is not inevitable. Falsely declaring that it's already done is at best a strawman argument.
Yet, evidently as soon as any surveillance topic comes up, hordes of HNers are happy to discard reading comprehension and act as if any hint that a step might be taken onto a slippery slope is a full endorsement of speedrunning down it.
With encryption backdoors, you only need two steps, and the second step is on the honor system, which is why people resist the first step. With this, it looks like there are more than two steps, but given that all future cars will effectively support this in software and will be internet connected such that it can be enabled remotely, we really only have two steps. It only appears to be multiple steps because older cars need retrofits, but again, that is not the case for all cars, and especially is not the case for future cars. Once we are in the future, it will be clear that this first step that seems so benign is the only step where there was any difficulty and the second step can be done with ease.