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NPR — Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant
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Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it up Data brokers buy up huge amounts of information from cell phones and browsers to sell for targeted advertising. But the government, including ICE, also buys the data.
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Technology
Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant
March 25, 20265:00 AM ET
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Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant
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ICE is among the government agencies that buy commercial data about Americans in bulk.
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
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Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
A whole industry of data brokers buys up vast quantities of electronic information from cell phone apps and web browsers and sells it to advertisers who use that data to target ads. The same industry also sells that data, including bulk cell phone location data, to police departments and federal government agencies in ways that can reveal intimate details about Americans without a warrant.
Now, privacy advocates say that the best chance for Congress to close the well-known loophole around the Fourth Amendment that allows for that sort of governmental snooping is coming up in just a few weeks.
That's when Congress is expected to take up reauthorization of what is known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to expire on April 20.
After a 2015 change to the law, federal agencies are not supposed to collect data on U.S. citizens in bulk. But some found a workaround to requesting warrants by simply buying the data instead.
Last week, some 130 civil society organizations signed on to a letter urging members of Congress to include closing the data broker loophole in FISA 702 reauthorization, citing the "unprecedented expansion of warrantless mass surveillance that is sweeping up the private information of communities across America" and the potential for the loophole to be used "to supercharge AI-powered surveillance."
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At a Senate hearing last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Federal Bureau of Investigations director Kash Patel if he would commit to not buying Americans' location data, which is usually obtained from cell phones. Patel declined to do so, instead saying the FBI "uses all tools" and "we do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us."
A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on which commercial data the FBI purchases. In 2023, then-FBI director Christopher Wray had indicated that the agency had backed away from using "commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising."
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Location records from brokers are typically unlinked to a device owner's name. But tools exist that help law enforcement track where a device has gone, where it spends every night and where it goes during working hours, said Bill Budington, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy organization.
AI tools present new challenges for privacy
Artificial intelligence can be leveraged to make such data even more powerful. The CEO of the AI company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, warned in a statement last month that records the government can purchase can be used by AI to assemble "a comprehensive picture of any person's life—automatically and at massive scale."
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Amodei's unwillingness to allow Anthropic's technology to be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons has led to a major fight with the Pentagon, which says a private company cannot dictate how the government lawfully uses its technology.
In addition to the FBI and the Department of Defense, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is also among the federal agencies that have had known contracts for tools that rely on cell phone location information sourced from data brokers. These developments come as ICE is ramping up its efforts to surveil not only immigrants who are targeted for deportation, but also people who record federal agents and protesters, using tools such as facial recognition, license plate data and administrative subpoenas to tech companies for user information.