The FBI has resumed purchasing Americans’ data and location history to aid federal investigations, agency Director Kash Patel testified to lawmakers on Wednesday.
According to Politico, this is the first time since 2023 that the FBI has confirmed it is buying access to people’s data collected from data brokers who get most of their information – including location data – from common consumer phone apps and games. At the time, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told senators that the agency had purchased access to people’s location data in the past but was not actively purchasing it.
When U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, asked whether the FBI would commit to not buying Americans’ location data, Patel said the agency “uses all tools at its disposal to accomplish its mission.”
“We purchased commercially available information that was consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act – and that gave us some valuable information,” Patel testified Wednesday.
Wyden said purchasing information about Americans without obtaining a warrant was an “outrageous end to the Fourth Amendment,” referring to the constitutional law that protects people in the US from device searches and data seizure.
An FBI spokesperson did not respond to questions about the agency’s purchases of commercial data, including how often the FBI obtained location data and from which brokers.
Government agencies typically have to persuade a judge to authorize a search warrant based on some evidence of a crime before they can seek private information about an individual from a technology or phone company. But in recent years, US agencies have circumvented this legal step by purchasing commercially available data from companies that capture large amounts of people’s location data originally obtained from phone apps or other commercial tracking technology.
For example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection purchased a tranche of data derived from real-time bidding, or RTB, services, according to a document obtained by 404 Media. These technologies are central to the mobile and web advertising industry, and they collect information such as location and other identifiable data that is used to target people who view ads. Surveillance companies can observe this process and collect information about a user’s location, and then potentially sell that data to brokers or federal agencies that want to bypass the warrant process.
The FBI claims it does not need a warrant to use this information for a federal investigation; However this legal theory has not yet been tested in court.
Last week, Wyden and several other lawmakers introduced a bipartisan, bicameral bill called the Government Surveillance Reform Act that, among other things, would require federal agencies to get court-authorized warrants before buying Americans’ information from data brokers.
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