The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials and government documents. The primary goal of the license-plate tracking program, run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, is to seize cars, cash and other assets to combat drug trafficking, according to one government document. But the databases use has expanded to hunt for vehicles associated with numerous other potential crimes, from kidnappings to killings to rapes, say people familiar with the matter.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 05:02:37 +0000