FBI Director Kash Patel testified to lawmakers Wednesday that the FBI continues to buy Americans’ information and location histories.
It’s the first time since 2023 that the FBI has confirmed that it has access to people’s data collected from data brokers, who get much of their data, including location data, from common consumer phone apps and games, For Politico. At the time, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told senators that the agency has access to people’s location data in the past but not actively buying it.
Asked by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, whether the FBI would commit to not buying Americans’ location data, Patel said the agency was “using all means to accomplish our mission.”
“We receive commercially available information under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that is constitutional and legal — and that has led to some valuable intelligence for us,” Patel testified Wednesday.
Wyden said buying information about Americans without a warrant is “a disgusting loophole around the Fourth Amendment,” citing a constitutional law that protects people in America from device searches and data interception.
An FBI spokesman did not respond to questions about the agency’s acquisition of commercial data, including how often and from which brokers the FBI obtains location data.
Government agencies usually have to convince a judge to authorize a search warrant based on some evidence of a crime before they can request personal information about a person from a technician or phone company. But in recent years, U.S. agencies have taken that legal step by buying commercially available data from companies that collect large amounts of people’s location data, originally obtained from phone apps or other commercial tracking technology.
For example, US Customs and Border Protection purchased a tranche of data from real-time bidding, or RTB services, according to the document it obtained. 404 Media. These technologies are central to the mobile and web advertising industry, and they collect information such as location and other identifiable information that is used to target people who view ads. Surveillance firms can observe this process and collect information about the user’s location, then sell that information to brokers or federal agencies, potentially looking to bypass the warrant process.
The FBI claims that a warrant is not needed to use this information for federal investigations; although this legal theory has yet to be tested in court.
Wyden and several other lawmakers filed last week bilateral, bicameral draft law Called the Government Surveillance Reform Act, the law requires federal agencies to obtain court authorization from data brokers to obtain Americans’ data.
