Turns out the FBI’s been on a shopping spree. And it’s not just any spending binge: as director Kash Patel made clear at a senate hearing on Wednesday, the agency is buying up location data on everyday American citizens.
“We do purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act,” Patel admitted under oath, “and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us.”
Since 2017, the supreme court has required warrants for any US law enforcement agency that wants to collect cell location data — but only if it’s obtained direct from a subject’s mobile carrier. Commercial data brokers, however, represent a grey-market alternative. By purchasing location history from third-party data companies, the FBI can bypass the warrant requirement altogether.
As Politico notes in its reporting on the senate hearing, numerous civil liberty groups have challenged the practice in court, but the loophole is still wide enough to drive a surveillance van through — a fact that drew plenty of criticism on Wednesday’s hearing.
“Doing that without a warrant is an outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment, it’s particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information,” said Democratic senator Ron Wyden.
Wyden, along with a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, recently introduced a bill called the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would hold law enforcement agencies to the same warrant requirement when purchasing data from a commercial broker, per Politico.
“The bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act counters these abuses by requiring a warrant to search Americans’ data and by closing the data broker loophole that allows the federal government to spy on citizens by purchasing private data that would otherwise require a warrant or subpoena,” Republican-party representative Warren Davidson said in the bill’s press release.
“Advances in technology, from AI to the explosion of Americans’ data available for purchase, have far outpaced the laws protecting Americans’ privacy and civil liberties,” Wyden concurred. “I’m proud to introduce this bipartisan bill as a leader of the Ben Franklin caucus, which stands for the proposition that liberty and security aren’t mutually exclusive.”
More on surveillance: Cities Are Shredding Their AI Surveillance Contracts en Masse
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