Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Patrick Leahy stated in a joint letter to Attorney General Eric Holder that government programs that track citizens’ movements and collect data from the phones of innocent Americans raise serious privacy concerns.

WASHINGTON, January 28 (Sputnik) — The Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) use of license plate tracking system to observe vehicles movement around the United States raises privacy concerns and questions the way the data is used, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Patrick Leahy said in a joint letter sent to Attorney General Eric Holder Wednesday.

“We appreciate that all of these new technologies are potentially useful law enforcement tools. But we remain concerned that government programs that track citizens’ movements, see inside homes, and collect data from the phones of innocent Americans raise serious privacy concerns,” Grassley and Leahy said. “We also have questions about the way in which the DEA’s database is being used,” they added.

Expansion of DEA’s nationwide license plate reader (LPR) surveillance program was revealed this week. Hundreds of millions of records about motorists are now included in the database and can be tracked in real-time, according to the statement by Senator Leahy’s press office.

This is not the first time Grassley and Leahy have risen privacy concerns about the use of emerging law enforcement technologies.

“Last week, they [Senators Grassley and Leahy] pressed the administration on the reported use of radar technology that may enable law enforcement agencies to track the movements of private citizens inside their homes. And last month, they questioned the use of cell-site simulators, which can indiscriminately sweep up the cell phone signals of innocent Americans,” according to Leahy’s press office statement.

To prove the legitimacy of the concerns, Senators reminded of the 2014 case, when the Department of Homeland Security looked into building a nation-wide vehicle tracking database, but changed its intentions after public concern about privacy violations.

Grassley and Leahy asked the Justice Department officials to provide a briefing to Judiciary Committee staff about LPR issues no later than February 13, 2015.

It is not yet clear whether the collection of information on US drivers has been supervised or approved by any court.

Concerns over privacy violation and the scale US government spying on Americans have been raised after the disclosure of NSA mass surveillance programs by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.