The state of Missouri is now tracking individual cell phones as their users travel the state’s highways in a program costing the state’s taxpayers $3 million per year.

The program joins a short but growing list of other cell phone user tracking programs in Baltimore, Md., Norfolk, Va., and Atlanta and Macon, Ga., as well as continuing surveillance of individuals by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In what would be the largest project of its kind, the Missouri Department of Transportation is negotiating with private contractors to monitor thousands of cell phones, using their movements to produce real-time traffic conditions on 5,500 miles of roads statewide.

Cell phone users won’t even know anyone’s watching them. But transportation and technology leaders assure there is no need to worry – the data will remain anonymous, leaving no possibility of tracking specific people from their driveway to their destination.

“There is absolutely no privacy threat whatsoever,” said Pete Rahn, director of the Missouri Department of Transportation.

But privacy advocates are uneasy.

“Even though its anonymous, it’s still ominous,” said Daniel Solove, a privacy law professor at George Washington University and author of the book, “The Digital Person.” “It troubles me, because it does show this movement toward using a technology to track people.”

Cell phone monitoring already is being used by transportation officials in Baltimore, though not yet to relay traffic conditions to the public. Similar projects are getting under way in Norfolk, Va., and a stretch of Interstate 75 between Atlanta and Macon, Ga.

But the Missouri project is by far the most aggressive – tracking wireless phones across a whole state, including in rural areas with lower traffic counts, and doing so for the explicit purpose of relaying the information to other travelers.

“This will be the biggest system in the world, assuming our contract ends up similar to what’s in the request” from the department, said Richard Mudge, vice president of Delcan NET, the Ontario, Canada-based company that won the Missouri bid and is currently negotiating the contract details. — Associated Press

Jake Porter at Hammer of Truth says, “Now being a Missourian this scares me. . . . A start of a police state?”

While the state claims the data is anonymous, it’s one very short step from there to tracking of individuals. And it won’t be long before the state takes that step.