News: Trucking industry to resist mandatory black box recording truck movements; new regulations 6/1/12

From Truckinginfo.com, Owner-Operator Group Challenges EOBR Rule, partly on Fourth Amendment grounds of government surveillance of realtime movements of big trucks:

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association filed a petition seeking review of the final rule mandating electronic on-board recorders for motor carriers with chronic noncompliance with hours-of-service regulations.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration earlier this year issued a final rule, which will go into effect June 1, 2012, requiring carriers that violate hours of service rules 10 percent of the time, based on single compliance review, to use electronic onboard recorders to track driver hours.

The association’s core argument against mandating “black boxes” is that there is no proof the devices can accurately and automatically record a driver’s hours of service and duty status. An EOBR can only track the movement and location of a truck; it requires human interaction to record any change of duty status.

. . .

Another argument against the use of the electronic on-board tracking devices centers on the Fourth Amendment.

“The real-time, government mandated, 24-hour electronic surveillance of a driver’s location and movements contemplated by the (notice of proposed rulemaking) is an unjustified and dangerous intrusion on drivers’ right of privacy,” the brief states.

The constitutional argument states that the constant monitoring constitutes a search of the driver within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.