Taxing Us to Spy on Us

Reading some Frederic Bastiat last night, I circled his observation that the government takes advantage of citizen passivity to increase its power, often by promising to “cure all the ills of mankind.” The government initiates “in the guise of actual services, what are nothing but restrictions; thereafter the nation pays, not for being served, but for being disserved.”


The Wall Street Journal reports that we pay our hard‐​earned tax dollars for the federal government to spy on us on the highways. Americans might think they are footing the $29 billion annual bill for the Department of Justice to secure our freedoms, but instead the department is abusing those freedoms:

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 database raises new questions about privacy and the scope of government surveillance. The existence of the program and its expansion were described in interviews with current and former government officials, and in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act request and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. It is unclear if any court oversees or approves the intelligence‐​gathering.


The documents show that the DEA also uses license‐​plate readers operated by state, local and federal law‐​enforcement agencies to feed into its own network and create a far‐​reaching, constantly updating database of electronic eyes scanning traffic on the roads to steer police toward suspects.


“Any database that collects detailed location information about Americans not suspected of crimes raises very serious privacy questions,’’ said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “It’s unconscionable that technology with such far‐​reaching potential would be deployed in such secrecy. People might disagree about exactly how we should use such powerful surveillance technologies, but it should be democratically decided, it shouldn’t be done in secret.’’


The disclosure of the DEA’s license‐​plate reader database comes on the heels of other revelations in recent months about the Justice Department, as well as the agencies it runs, gathering data about innocent Americans as it searches for criminals. In November, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Marshals Service flies planes carrying devices that mimic cellphone towers in order to scan the identifying information of Americans’ phones as it searches for criminal suspects and fugitives.

Why do government officials try to keep such programs secret? I suspect it’s because they know they are disserving us by undermining our liberties. As for members of Congress, they often do little more than say government spying on us “raises concerns,” but the license plate program is a good opportunity for them to stand up to the executive branch and put a stop to it.


Notes:


The Journal’s report is not an entirely new revelation. In this essay, I mentioned that the Department of Homeland Security also has a license plate spying program.


Walter Olson weighs‐​in here.