DEA tracking millions of drivers across US

In 2008, the Drug Enforcement Agency created a program to automatically read and monitor vehicle license plates near border crossings in California, Arizona, and Texas. Federal authorities explained that the system would be used strictly to track the movement of contraband and money by Mexican drug cartels. Today, however, the system has been secretly expanded to hundreds of cameras and scanners far away from border crossings, from Georgia to New Jersey to Florida. The resulting database tracks the movement of millions of vehicles - maybe yours - throughout the United States. Who says that bureaucrats don't know how to take an idea and run with it?

According to documents and e-mails obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, the vast database can be searched by any participating police agency. No search warrants are required, and no court supervises the system's management. Not that long ago, the idea of maintaining such information on the movement of law-abiding citizens would have been universally derided as a police state tactic. Many of the same politicians who rush to the microphones to denounce Facebook or Google for using "personal" data to help sell consumers shampoo or Doritos are proving awfully quiet about the proliferation of government databases on private citizens.