Secret DEA program tracks vehicle movement throughout the US
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The Drug Enforcement Administration is operating a secret program to track vehicle movement throughout the United States through license plate readers, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and a newspaper report.
The program uses high-tech cameras on major highways to track time, direction and location of vehicles, the Wall Street Journal (sub. req.) reports. Some cameras are also able to record images of drivers and passengers. The story relies on documents obtained by the ACLU through a freedom of information request and interviews with anonymous sources. An ACLU summary is here.
The vehicle tracking program began in 2008 with a focus on cars in states near the Southwest border, part of an effort to fight drug trafficking, the story says. The goal was to seize cars, cash and other drug dealer assets, according to one document examined by the newspaper.
A year later, state and local authorities began participating in the program. Their local cameras feed into the network, and the data is used to track vehicles linked to other crimes, such as kidnapping, murder and rape, the Wall Street Journal says. About 100 cameras were feeding into the database in 2011; current numbers are unknown.
At one time, the license plate data was held for two years, but the time period has been reduced to three months, a Justice Department spokesman told the Wall Street Journal.
ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley criticized the secret program in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “Any database that collects detailed location information about Americans not suspected of crimes raises very serious privacy questions,” Stanley said. “It’s unconscionable that technology with such far-reaching potential would be deployed in such secrecy.”
See also:
ABA Journal: “Law enforcement’s latest highway tech speeds up info-gathering, but critics say it violates privacy”
ABAJournal.com: “Proposed California bill would restrict license-plate scanning”
Updated on Feb. 9 to add quotation marks in final paragraph.
