The Justice Department has been secretly gathering information on motorists in order to build a national database tracking the movement of vehicles across the country.

The Wall Street Journal released a report on Monday that said the Drug Enforcement Administration is running a license-plate tracking program in order to combat drug trafficking. The goal of this program is to seize cars, cash and other assets. The information gathered by the database has recently been expanded to find vehicles involved in kidnappings, murder and rape and has also been expanded to stretch across the country.

Previously, DEA officials have said they use the information to track vehicles near the Mexico border in order to combat drug cartels. The database program started in 2008 and was opened to state and local authorities the following year. It originally began in Border States like Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas.

State and local law-enforcement agencies have also been utilizing the database for their own investigations, allowing local officers opportunities to track vehicles in real time on major roadways.

The program collects information about vehicle movements, including time, directions and location. This information is gathered from high-tech cameras placed on major highways. These devices also collect the images of drivers and passengers. By 2011, the DEA had 100 cameras connected to the database.

The database includes information gathered from license plate readers operated by state, local and federal law-enforcement agencies. These license-plate readers are already used by police departments and U.S. companies to collect debts and repossess vehicles.

This program is sure to receive objections from the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics of government surveillance and violations of privacy.

"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.''

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