Highway Vehicles (Photo : Reuters)
The U.S. federal law enforcement agency Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which job is to hunt drug smugglers within the U.S., is said to be building a database that will store millions of records to record and track real-time vehicle movements within United States, The Wall Street Journal reported.
It is said that DEA started to quietly collecting and compiling millions of U.S. license plates in 2008, in which, aims to track and hunt contrabands and smuggled drugs near U.S-Mexico border though it increased its coverage to a nationwide hunt.
There had been 100 cameras deployed in number of areas, such Arizona, Texas, Florida, California, New Jersey, Georgia and New Mexico, that takes a snap on every vehicle and records its license plates. The cameras, where some of these are able to take a picture of the vehicle's passengers and driver, also records the direction and the time of travel for each vehicles, PC World reported.
Aside from cameras, DEA was able to utilize state operated license plate readers since 2011. With the use of these readers, some enforcement agencies were able to tap into its database that runs in its El Paso Intelligence Center. As of to date, federal officials has not disclosed on how many cameras are being used to feed information on DEA's database due to the fact that disclosing such data could avoid criminal's exposure.
On the other hand, Department of Justice spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that DEA having been able to use license plate reader in stopping drug smuggling and arresting criminals is not something new though Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy has a different point of view. The Democrat said that this kind of practice from DEA raises privacy issues and is outrageous as Americans should not be worrying about them being spied by the U.S. government.
