If you click on the map above, you’ll be taken to a just-released interactive map that American Civil Liberties Union put together on the fast-growing trend of local law enforcement agencies photographing — and retaining data about — millions of license plates. The map links to responses received from local law enforcement agences to a public records requests ACLU made about the plate tracking systems.

The ACLU analyzed 26,000 pages of documents that it received with the records requests and concluded ” increasingly, all of this [license plate] data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years.”

“The implementation of automatic license plate readers poses serious privacy and other
civil liberties threats,” the ACLU said in a 37-page report. “More and more cameras, longer retention periods, and widespread sharing allow law enforcement agents to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.:

ON THE JUMP PAGE: Read the full report.