Millions of cars tracked across US in 'massive' real-time DEA spy program
Millions of cars tracked across US in 'massive' real-time
DEA spy program
American Civil Liberties Union warns scanning of license
plates by Drug Enforcement Agency is building a repository of all drivers’
movements
The DEA database has the potential to track every
driver's movements, the American Civil Liberties Union has warned.
By Rory Carroll in Los Angeles
Tuesday 27 January 2015 08.55 EST
The United States government is tracking the movement of
vehicles around the country in a clandestine intelligence-gathering programme
that has been condemned as a further official exercise to build a database on
people’s lives.
The Drug Enforcement Administration was monitoring
license plates on a “massive” scale, giving rise to “major civil liberties
concerns”, the American Civil Liberties Union said on Monday night, citing DEA
documents obtained under freedom of information.
“This story highlights yet another way government
security agencies are seeking to quietly amplify their powers using new
technologies,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with ACLU, told the
Guardian.
“On this as on so many surveillance issues, we can take
action, put in place some common sense limits or sit back and let our society
be transformed into a place we won’t recognize – or probably much like.”
The advocacy group said the DEA records it obtained from
the justice department were heavily redacted and incomplete.
“These records do, however, offer documentation that this
program is a major DEA initiative that has the potential to track our movements
around the country. With its jurisdiction and its finances, the federal
government is uniquely positioned to create a centralized repository of all
drivers’ movements across the country — and the DEA seems to be moving toward
doing just that.”
If license plate readers continued to proliferate without
restriction and the DEA held license plate reader data for extended periods the
agency would soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of people’s lives,
the ACLU said, especially if combined with other surveillance data such as bulk
phone records or information gleaned by the US Marshals Service using aircraft
that mimic cellphone towers.
“Data-mining the information, an unproven law enforcement
technique that the DEA has begun to use here, only exacerbates these concerns,
potentially tagging people as criminals without due process,” the ACLU warned.
The Wall Street Journal, citing official documents and
anonymous officials, reported that the programme built a national database to
track vehicles in real time and stored hundreds of millions of records about
motorists.
The primary goal was to seize cars, cash and other assets
to combat drug trafficking but the database expanded to monitor vehicles
associated with other potential crimes, it said.
Officials have publicly acknowledged they track vehicles
near the Mexican border to combat drug trafficking.
But the database’s expansion “thoughout the United
States”, as one DEA email put it, worried Senator Patrick Leahy, who sits on
the Senate judiciary committee.
“The fact that this intrusive technology is potentially
being used to expand the reach of the government’s asset forfeiture efforts is
of even greater concern,’’ he told the Wall Street Journal.
Leahy called for additional accountability and said
Americans should not have to fear that “their locations and movements are
constantly being tracked and stored in a massive government database”.
A spokesman for the justice department, which includes
the DEA, said the program complied with federal law. “It is not new that the
DEA uses the license-plate reader program to arrest criminals and stop the flow
of drugs in areas of high trafficking intensity,’’ the spokesman said.
According to the ACLU, the government-run national
license plate tracking program dates from 2008. Information had trickled out
over the years but far too little was known about the program, the ACLU said.
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