Is the government watching your car? According to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal and the American Civil Liberties Union the DEA is scanning and storing information on hundreds of millions of motorists. Heavily redacted and undated documents show there are at least 100 license plate readers fanned across the United States gathering intelligence.

Yahoo Finance’s Jeff Macke says, “This is the way you become a police state. Little bits at a time. No one ever announces we’re going to track all of our citizens at all times and build cases against them later. They do things like this.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department told the Journal that the program is legal. “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.’’

Macke thinks the scope and breadth of the program is worrisome. “It sounds great if you’re talking about capturing all kinds of nefarious people. It doesn’t sound so great when you’re talking about tracking everyone and deciding whether or not they committed a crime later.”

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The DEA started the program at several Southwest border crossings to help combat illegal drug trafficking. It’s now morphed into a centralized database that has the potential to track Americans movement around the country. Macke adds that this is just the latest effort on the part of the government to infringe on law-abiding citizens. “We’re giving away our personal liberties all over the place and we really have no check and balance system. When the government is allowed to do these types of tracking systems in secret, all of a sudden you have to figure out what secrets you’re not figuring out because there’s never one cockroach.”

The revelation of the license plate scanning database comes on the heels of Attorney General Eric Holder announcing changes to another program known as Civil Asset Forfeiture. Started in the 1980s by the Justice Department, it allows the government to seize property, cash, cars and other items of value allegedly linked to illegal activity.

The confiscations can occur without criminal charges being filed. Federal law and most states allow the government to keep most or all of the valuables they acquire. Holder’s new rules will not permit federal agencies to accept assets seized by local and state law enforcement. Materials can still be confiscated if they are considered a concern for public safety.

Macke says we’re handing over a lot of power to the government and this is just the tip of the iceberg. “This is not the only thing the government is doing that intrudes on the privacy of law abiding citizens. There’s a bunch of other stuff underneath the surface. The government has more data than it knows what to do with about us.”

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