The government could be watching your road trips soon.
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a national system to track vehicle license plates that is intended to fight crime but has met with opposition from privacy advocates, The Washington Post reported.
The database would rely on commercial and law enforcement tag readers around the country, which would scan every license plate in their path. It "could only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals," a spokeswoman for DHS's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency told the Post.
Even when fighting crime would be the intended objective, concerns have been raised about the sheer amount of data that would be gathered in one place. The database could hold more than 1 billion records, and the government proposal has not specified what privacy measures, if any, would be implemented.
"Ultimately, you're creating a national database of location information," Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Post. "When all that data is compiled and aggregated, you can track somebody as they're going through their life."
The database would also be compiled by a private company, giving Americans the worst of both worlds: a private data collection that can be tapped by the government.
"It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the commercial enterprise, not the government," ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen specified to the Post.
ICE has issued a notice to find a company to build the database using sources that include law enforcement agencies and car-repossession services.
"This is yet another example of the government's appetite for tools of mass surveillance," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the ACLU, which objected last year to license plate reader technology that was reportedly photographing thousands of license plates per minute.
If the government builds such a tracking infrastructure, your whereabouts on any day could be stored as data.
"The logic of license-plate monitoring is similar to that used by NSA officials who insist on collecting data on the phone calls of millions in hopes of catching a few bad guys," The Atlantic pointed out in an editorial.
"If the federal government has its way, the car trips of millions of innocents will be collected and stored in a database. Drive somewhere in 2014, and 10 years from now a bureaucrat could look up where you went on a given Tuesday."
UPDATE: The advertisement seeking a contractor for the license plate tracking system was taken down, and the plan has been cancelled, according to a report from Bloomberg Businesweek.
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