The Wall Street Journal is reporting the Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the United States. The secret domestic intelligence-gathering program scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration created the license plate-tracking program to combat drug trafficking, but many state and local law enforcement agencies are accessing the database for a variety of investigations. High-tech cameras placed strategically on major highways are used to collect data about vehicle movements, including time, direction and location, as well as visual images of drivers and passengers. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, criticized the program, saying Americans shouldn’t have to fear “their locations and movements are constantly being tracked and stored in a massive government database.”