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 means possible 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.
An FBI spokeswoman did not respond to questions about the FBI's purchase of commercial data, including how often and from which brokers the agency 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, including location information and other identifiable data, about the people viewing and targeting 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.