As usual, Glenn Beck is doing his misleading best to scare people. The consumer version of the program has no such login, and offers no possibility of any government takeover of your computer. Why anyone pays attention to that loon is beyond me.

See EFF for some sanity:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/08/cars-gov-terms-service

When logged on to the CARS system, your computer is considered a Federal computer system and is the property of the U.S. Government. Any or all uses of this system and all files on this system may be intercepted, monitored, recorded, copied, audited, inspected, and disclosed... to authorized CARS, DoT, and law enforcement personnel, as well as authorized officials of other agencies, both domestic and foreign.

Chances are, it's just the boilerplate text that the use at the DoTransportation for the machines they assign to their personnel. However, the government actually does have the authority, under federal law, to convert your private property into federal property if you are at a government facility and plug your personal or corporate PC into their network. (I don't necessarily agree with that myself, but I don't know anyone who has successfully challenged the feds on that one).

Mike T,

You may be right. But Beck makes it seem like going to that website does this consumers. Which is not the case. That boilerplate – which has since been removed – only came up when dealers, who had already registered for the program, logged in.

Glenn Beck's whole schtick is to terrify the ignorant, and he is trying to do so again here.

I personally find Beck to be the least objectionable of the major commentators. He's always struck me as a fairly well-meaning guy who gets himself so worked up that he comes of a little off kilter.

Then again, I watch the criticism that gets leveled at him by sites like Digg, while his leftist counterparts get a free pass, so I tend to write of 95% of it as hypocrisy.