This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 30, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

New documents reveal the vast and intrusive program by the DEA and other agencies to track license plates with the hint that

they'd compile that data on people at gun shows and other gatherings.

Adam Bates is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice, he describes the problem.

The ACLU submitted a FOIA request to the Drug Enforcement Agency and from the data they got back they found that the DEA has a

expansive program of license plate readers and this data that the DEA has been collecting from

people's cars from their license plates is being collated and

warehoused and obviously there are concerns about who has access to this information and what it's being used for.

This is from The Guardian.

Documents released by the ACLU on Wednesday show that Drug enforcement administration officials in Phoenix planned

on quote working closely with the B ATF to monitor public gun shows with the automatic technology as early as 2009.

Right, so the DEA has said that this was merely a suggestion that was never implemented,

but the ACOU pointed out that nothing they got from their FOIA request constitutes a denial

of this program.

We basically have to take the DEA's word that this was never actually implemented.

But the idea was to set up at right at public gun shows with these

automated license plate readers and collect the license plate information of

everybody who came in and out of that gun show.

And obviously the kinds of things like where you're going and what groups of people you associate

with has historically been a kind of protected idea in American law that freedom of assembly

should be free from scrutiny of the government unless you're engaged in some kind of behavior

...