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The FBI has resumed purchasing large amounts of Americans’ data and geographic histories to aid federal investigations, the agency’s director, Kash Patel, testified before lawmakers on Wednesday.
This is the first time since 2023 that the FBI has confirmed that it was buying access to people’s data collected from data brokers, who get much of their information — including location data — from regular consumer phone apps and games. For politics. At the time, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told senators That the agency purchased access to people’s location data In the past, but she wasn’t actively buying it.
When asked by US Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon, whether the FBI would commit to not buying Americans’ location data, Patel said the agency was “using all the tools… to do our job.”
“We purchase commercially available information that complies with the Constitution and the laws under the TCPA — and that has resulted in some valuable intelligence for us,” Patel testified Wednesday.
Wyden said that purchasing information about Americans without obtaining a warrant was a “heinous circumvention of the Fourth Amendment,” referring to the constitutional law that protects people in America from device searches and data seizures.
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 what intermediaries.
Government agencies usually have to convince a judge to allow a search warrant to be issued based on some evidence of a crime before they can request private information about someone from a technology or phone company. But in recent years, US agencies have avoided this legal step by purchasing commercially available data from companies that collect large amounts of people’s location data originally derived from phone apps or other commercial tracking technology.
For example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection purchased a trove of data derived from real-time bidding services, or RTB services, according to a document obtained by 404 media. These technologies are central to the mobile and web advertising industry, and collect information including location and other identifying data about the people who see ads and are targeted. Surveillance companies can monitor this process and collect information about a user’s location, and then sell that data to brokers or federal agencies looking to circumvent the authorization process.
The FBI claims that it does not need a warrant to use this information in federal investigations; Although this legal theory has not yet been tested in court.
Last week, Wyden and several other lawmakers filed The bill is bipartisan and bicameral It’s called the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which, among other things, requires a court-authorized warrant before federal agencies can buy Americans’ information from data brokers.