The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, confirmed this Wednesday before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee that the agency buys data available on the market to track movements and know the location of people. The statement represents the first express confirmation of this practice since the previous director of the agency, Christopher Wray, maintained in 2023 that it had been done in the past.
Patel defended during the hearing that this access to personal information conforms to the American legal framework. According to what he explained, the FBI resorts to data commercialized by private companies that collect digital traces of users and then sell it to third parties.
"We acquire market-available information that is compatible with the Constitution and the laws of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and this has provided us with valuable intelligence information" - Kash Patel, director of the FBI
Purchase of personal data from private intermediaries
The FBI's access occurs through data brokers or data merchants, companies that gather information obtained from the everyday use of digital services. Among that material are credit card transactions and social media activity, according to known data.
The text indicates that that information can be sold to private or institutional buyers provided that they are not foreign adversaries such as China, Russia or Iran.
The practice allows the agency to obtain personal information without directly resorting to mobile phone operators, an especially sensitive point since the change in criteria set by the Supreme Court of the United States.
The debate on the court order
Since 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court requires police forces to have a judicial order for telephone companies to hand over their customers' location data. That requirement affects direct handover by operators, but the political and legal debate has shifted in recent years towards the purchase of data already commercialized by third parties.
In that context, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and Republican Senator Mike Lee introduced last Friday the Government Surveillance Reform Act.
The proposal would oblige the FBI and the rest of police or intelligence agencies to always have a court order to access personal data of the citizenry.
Criticism in the Senate for the scope of tracking
During Patel's appearance, Wyden railed against this method of obtaining information and warned of the added risk that, in his opinion, the use of artificial intelligence tools poses to process large volumes of private data.
"Doing so without a warrant is an outrageous mockery of the Fourth Amendment; it is especially dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to track massive amounts of private information" - Ron Wyden, Democratic senator
The FBI's confirmation thus reopens the clash between intelligence needs and legal limits on privacy, at a time when the Senate is studying a reform to close this avenue of access to personal information without judicial authorization.