Let me tell you about a law most Americans have never heard of. Eighteen months from now, every new car sold in the…

Let me tell you about a law most Americans have never heard of. Eighteen months from now, every new car sold in the United States will come with technology that watches you drive. Infrared cameras tracking your eyes. Sensors measuring your pupil dilation. Software analyzing your head position. Software analyzing your behavior at the wheel. If the artificial intelligence in your car decides you are impaired, your car can refuse to start. Or limit your speed to 25 miles per hour. Or shut off entirely while you are driving. This is not a proposal. This is federal law. It applies to model year 2027. Here is the case for the law. 🧵

Drunk driving kills roughly 13,500 Americans a year. Drowsy driving kills thousands more. Together they cause about a third of all American traffic deaths. Mothers Against Drunk Driving has fought for this technology for years. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates the technology could save 9,000 to 10,000 lives every year.

Saving 10,000 lives is not nothing. That argument is real. It deserves to be made. Here is the case against the law. The technology is not ready. In March of this year, NHTSA itself sent a report to Congress saying the systems are not reliable enough to mandate. The agency used the words "unacceptable error rates." Automakers agreed.

Here is the math that stopped NHTSA cold. Americans drive about three trillion miles per year across hundreds of millions of vehicles. Even if the system worked correctly 99.9 percent of the time, that would still mean millions to tens of millions of false readings every year. Sober drivers being told they cannot start their cars. Alert drivers being told they cannot drive home. Imagine your car refusing to start during a wildfire evacuation. Imagine your car limiting your speed to 25 miles per hour on a highway when nothing is wrong. Imagine the system glitching when you are driving someone to the emergency room. That is what 99.9 percent accuracy actually means at this scale.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky has been one of the few elected officials to speak against this on the House floor. Massie has named the law for what it is: an unconstitutional system that lets the federal government decide whether an American citizen can use their own vehicle. He is right.

Now here is the part I want you to sit with. The law does not require automakers to share your biometric data. The law also does not prohibit it. Last February, CNN published an investigation showing that 90 percent of new cars already track your driving every three seconds. Speed. Braking. Phone use. Exact location. Automakers were already selling that data to companies like LexisNexis for up to one hundred dollars per vehicle per year. LexisNexis was selling it to insurance companies. Drivers were finding out their rates had gone up because their car had reported them. The Federal Trade Commission banned General Motors from selling driver data for five years over this exact practice. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called it "unlawfully collecting drivers' private data."

Now Congress wants to add eye tracking, pupil dilation, and impairment scoring to the data being collected. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has already announced that driver behavior monitoring will become a factor in their Top Safety Pick awards by 2030. The insurance industry is paying attention. They are waiting. The law was written to save lives. The data architecture it creates will outlast every administration that touches it. What ships as an impairment detector can be expanded through over-the-air software updates after you buy the car. There is no opt-out provision in the law for the driver.

Drunk driving kills 13,500 Americans a year. That problem is real and the people pushing this law are not lying about wanting to fix it. But you cannot solve a real problem by building a surveillance system that does not work yet, has no privacy protections, sends biometric data to insurance companies who price your premiums based on it, and includes no opt-out for the driver who paid for the car. This is a left-and-right civil liberties issue. Republican Congressman Massie is fighting it. Republican Texas Attorney General Paxton is fighting it. The left-leaning Center for Democracy and Technology is fighting it. The Future of Privacy Forum is fighting it. Even NHTSA, the federal agency tasked with writing the rule, is telling Congress the technology is not ready. Both parties own this. The law is Section 24220 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It was signed by President Biden with broad bipartisan support. President Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act on February 3 of this year preserving the funding and the legal requirement. He could have killed it. He did not. The federal mandate becomes binding in 2027. Eighteen months. Eighteen months to either fix the law, kill the mandate, or accept that every new car in America will be watching the person who paid for it. Never stop connecting the dots.