The FBI has resumed purchasing large amounts of Americans’ data and location history to aid federal investigations, FBI Director Kash Patel testified to lawmakers Wednesday.
This is the first time since 2023 that the FBI has acknowledged purchasing access to people’s data collected from data brokers, which obtain much of the information, including location data, from consumer mobile apps and games, according to Politico. At the time, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told senators that the FBI had purchased access to people’s location data in the past, but not actively.
Asked by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) if he would commit that the FBI would not buy location data on Americans, Patel said the FBI would “use every tool at our disposal to accomplish our mission.”
“We purchase commercially available information that is compliant with the Constitution and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and that has led to information that is valuable to us,” Patel testified Wednesday.
Wyden said buying information about Americans without a warrant is “an outrageous overreach of the Fourth Amendment,” citing the Constitution, which protects Americans from device searches and data seizures.
When contacted by TechCrunch, an FBI spokesperson declined to comment beyond Patel’s statement and did not answer questions about the FBI’s purchase of commercial data, such as how often and from which brokers the FBI obtained location data.
Before government agencies can request personal information about individuals from technology or phone companies, they typically have to persuade a judge to issue a search warrant based on evidence of a crime. But in recent years, U.S. government agencies have circumvented this legal action by purchasing commercially available data from companies that amass vast amounts of people’s location data, originally obtained from phone apps and other commercial tracking technologies.
For example, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has purchased some of the data obtained from real-time bidding (RTB) services, according to documents obtained by 404 Media. These technologies are central to the mobile and web advertising industry and collect information such as location and other identifiable data that is used to target users who view ads. Surveillance companies monitor this process, collect information about users’ locations, and may sell that data to brokers or federal agencies seeking to circumvent the warrant process.
The FBI claims it does not need a warrant to use this information in federal investigations. 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 Oversight Reform Act. Among other things, the bill would require a court-approved warrant before federal agencies can purchase information about Americans from data brokers.
Updated with response from FBI.
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