Biden Calls Chinese Electric Vehicles a Security Threat::The president ordered an investigation into auto technology that could track U.S. drivers, part of a broader effort to stop E.V. and other smart-car imports from China.
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their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing
Cool. So let’s pass legislation that prevents any auto manufacturer from sending sensitive info to anyone unauthorized by the owner of the car. Just because you buy a car “assembled” in the US doesn’t mean that your data isn’t being harvested, stored improperly, and sold to all bidders.
Don’t stop at cars
China is the largest producer of EVs in the world by far (the next country on the list, Germany doesn’t even come close). In fact, China produces more EVs than the next 4 top producers combined.
The US is running scared because there is absolutely no way they can compete, unless they severely handicap the competition.
So, instead of free competition in Western markets, we have coddled American companies that are “too big to fail” that will continue producing obsolete technologies. If we haven’t already, we’ll start to see Boeing’s product issues in American cars.
This is one of the reasons the US is looking to restrict Chinese EV imports. And to be clear, they’re so cheap because the CCP is subsidizing the entire Chinese EV industry, since they want to entirely own the market. But that’s not all.
China, as you may know, has a lot of serious problems around privacy and surveillance. More pointedly: it’s a surveillance state. It’s entirely possible that Chinese EVs could be sending back tons of data to servers in China. That data could be related to users and passengers… but it could also be area surveillance and data gathering (i.e. effectively employing multiple cars in a particular area as a distributed integrated sensor system), because modern cars have a shitload of cameras and microphones in them these days. I would be extremely unsurprised if the CCP was leveraging EV data gathering as an intelligence source. Think about it: they could give/sell near-realtime information to anyone they feel like. The CCP themselves is interested, I’m sure, in what’s going on in Taipei right now. They might sell South Korean data to North Korea. They might sell Ukrainian or Moldovan or Latvian or Finnish data to Russia. Those states might then turn around and use that data to try to destabilize the specified target countries, or even to assist with an invasion.
There are a LOT of reasons why letting the CCP own a vast majority of global EV production is a bad idea.
Remember when the Patriot Act was a thing?
Surveillance of your citizens isn’t a CCP only thing.
Yeah. I know. But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about this.
Whataboutism isn’t going to change what I said, or how accurate what I said is.
It’s not whataboutism, it’s hypocrisy.
It’s really not, and it’s also not really apples to apples.
The Patriot Act, and the level of surveillance it enabled and continues to enable, is absolutely bad, and I am absolutely not defending it.
But the CCP comprehensively surveils its citizenry in ways that would appall people born and raised in the west - think “you were having a bad day last week and you yelled at a rude store clerk, and a camera caught that and flagged it for a party official to review, so now your metro card won’t take you anywhere besides work and home”. That’s a level of granular surveillance and control that’s commonplace in China, and would be absolutely unheard of in a non-authoritarian state.
To get back to the main points I am expressing here:
- the CCP is an authoritarian surveillance state
- companies in mainland China are forced, as a matter of policy, to give the CCP an extreme level of access to basically all of their data (incidentally, this is one of the main reasons the biotech company I work at bailed on China altogether in the last couple years, despite the huge patient demographics we could address there, because their surveillance laws directly collide with a ton of western medical privacy laws)
- the CCP is a geopolitical adversary to much of the west at this point, and is becoming more adversarial
- the CCP has an established pattern and practice of leveraging industrial espionage and reverse engineering to further their own national interests. There are numerous significant examples of this.
Thus, it stands to reason that the CCP, which is footing the bill for a meaningful percentage of their auto industry’s EV development costs, could very plausibly make “throw tons of sensors in there and pipe the data to us” a condition of that assistance.
China and America are not the same but the solution works against all actors: permit users to audit and change the code so dependencies on servers can be removed or replaced with ones of our choice. Without the source code to learn what it’s actually doing then all software is potentially a security threat, at best it’s just not yet guilty of being malware or having anti-features.
Why should every car owner have to also be a tech nerd or security specialist just to guarantee their car is safe to drive and own? They should be guaranteed safe before they are even sold.
Of course, consumers should have full control over the technology they buy, but it should be safe and secure before it is even sold in the first place. 
The only way to know it is safe is 3rd parties auditing it. The manufacture saying “trust me bro” ain’t it and a government audit that doesn’t show their work could be bullshit too. A single tech nerd or security specialist is in the same boat as the regular Joe - it’s a group effort. Non-techies can contribute in other ways (e.g. reporting bugs).
That’s why government agencies should be transparent and better funded
To be so transparent that we can actually verify the government’s findings means a 3rd party is doing the same job the government did. Anything less is the government saying “trust us”. [Edit to clarify what I meant] It’s cheaper for a bad company to pay for lobbyists or buyout a few politicians than to somehow buyout every 3rd party.
