Federal Data Broker Purchase Authorities (Ongoing)

• Type: Executive branch practice — not a single statute; operates under existing agency procurement and intelligence authorities
• Primary agencies: DHS (since at least 2017), ICE, CBP, FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation, Secret Service, Department of Defense
• Key contractors: Venntel, Babel Street, Palantir, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and others
• Legal challenge: Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (passed House 2024; stalled in Senate)

The government knows where you went last Tuesday. It knows where you went last month. It knows which church you attended, which political meeting you walked into, which clinic you visited, which protest you drove past. It did not get a warrant. It did not arrest you. It did not even knock on your door. It bought the information from a company that bought it from your phone. Your weather app, your navigation app, the game you installed in 2021 — those apps collected your location and sold it. The government bought it. You have essentially no legal protection. The courts have not stopped this. Congress has not stopped this. And in February 2026, DHS signed a $1 billion contract with Palantir to run all of that purchased data through AI at industrial scale.

How It Passed

There was no single vote. No law created this practice. Federal agencies built it quietly through procurement — purchasing data broker services under existing agency spending authorities the same way they buy office supplies and computer equipment. The practice began at least as early as 2017 at DHS and spread to ICE, CBP, the FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation, and the Secret Service.

The legal theory is the "third-party doctrine" — the Supreme Court's 1976 ruling in United States v. Miller that you have no Fourth Amendment privacy interest in information you voluntarily share with a third party. The agencies' position: you "voluntarily" shared your location with a smartphone app, so when they buy that data, no warrant is required. They are just buying information you already gave away.

This is a fiction, and the agencies know it. No one meaningfully consented to their location data flowing from a weather app to a data broker to federal law enforcement. But the fiction has never been definitively rejected by the courts, and Congress has not passed a law closing the loophole. So the practice continues — and expands.

What It Does To You

The data broker pipeline works in four steps that happen completely invisibly to you:

1. A smartphone app — a weather app, a game, a navigation tool, a coupon app, a fitness tracker — collects your precise GPS location through your phone as part of its normal operation. The "terms of service" you clicked through, in text no one reads, authorized this.
2. The app company sells your location data to a commercial data broker. The broker aggregates location records from hundreds of millions of devices into a searchable database.
3. A federal agency — DHS, ICE, the FBI, IRS Criminal Investigation — purchases access to that database. No warrant. No subpoena. No court order. They pay the market rate for a commercial data service.
4. The agency uses the data to track your movements, identify your associations, map your routines, and build patterns of your life — sometimes going back months or years.

ICE is using this data right now to find and arrest people. Not at border crossings. In their homes. In their churches. In their workplaces. These are locations that courts have historically given heightened Fourth Amendment protection — the home most of all. ICE is walking around those protections by buying data instead of obtaining warrants.

The IRS Criminal Investigation division was purchasing phone location data to conduct criminal investigations without court orders. The Secret Service purchased location data. The Department of Defense purchased it. This is not a fringe practice at one rogue agency. It is standard operating procedure across federal law enforcement and intelligence.

And now there is Palantir. In February 2026, DHS signed a $1 billion contract with Palantir to deploy AI-powered surveillance analytics across all of DHS — CBP and ICE — integrating purchased data broker records with other government databases. This is not a file cabinet full of location pings. This is machine learning processing your movements, your associations, your behavioral patterns, and your social connections at a scale no human analyst could achieve. The data broker loophole has been industrialized.

Rights It Strips

Fourth Amendment. The Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires warrants based on probable cause. The entire point of the data broker purchase system is to obtain the same information a warrant would require — your location, your movements, your associations — without getting a warrant. The government cannot legally surveil your movements without a warrant. But it can buy a record of your movements from a company that collected them without authorization from you. The constitutional protection is being neutralized by a purchasing contract.

First Amendment. Location data is not neutral. It reveals which political meetings you attended, which places of worship you visit, which protest you drove past, which advocacy organization's office you walked into. The government tracking your physical associations is government surveillance of your political and religious activity. The right of free association — recognized by the Supreme Court as inseparable from the First Amendment — means nothing if the government can map your associations from data broker records without a warrant.

Fifth Amendment. Criminal investigations and immigration enforcement actions are being built on purchased data with no grand jury process, no judicial authorization, and no notice to the person whose data was used. The targets of these investigations have no way to know the surveillance occurred, no way to challenge its legality before an action is taken against them, and no meaningful due process protection.

Practical privacy. Carpenter v. United States (2018) gave the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule on whether aggregated location data deserves Fourth Amendment protection. The Court said yes — for cell-site location information obtained from carriers. But the ruling did not cover broker-purchased data, and lower courts have not extended Carpenter to close the broker loophole. You have no reliable legal protection right now. Courts have not squarely addressed this. The law has not been passed to fix it.

Documented Abuses / Documented Harms

ICE using location data to arrest people without warrants in protected locations. ICE is using data broker purchases to track and arrest people in their homes, churches, and workplaces — all locations courts have recognized as deserving heightened Fourth Amendment protection. The warrant requirement that should protect people in those locations is being bypassed entirely through the data broker system.

IRS Criminal Investigation purchasing location data for criminal investigations. A 2021 ACLU report documented the IRS's CI division purchasing phone location data to build criminal cases without court orders. The IRS is using financial investigation tools that explicitly require court process — and then going around those requirements by buying the same information commercially.

FBI Director Kash Patel refused to commit to stop. When directly asked by Senator Ron Wyden whether the FBI would stop purchasing Americans' location data without warrants, FBI Director Kash Patel refused to commit to stopping the practice. This is the Director of the FBI, asked a direct question about a clear constitutional issue, declining to say the agency would respect the Fourth Amendment. That answer tells you everything about the current institutional posture toward warrantless surveillance.

The $1 billion Palantir AI contract. In February 2026, DHS signed a $1 billion contract to deploy Palantir's AI-powered analytics across CBP and ICE, integrating broker-purchased location data with other government databases and running the combined dataset through machine learning. This is not metadata. This is a system designed to find patterns in your movements, flag associations between people, and surface "anomalies" in your behavior — all without warrants, all without judicial oversight, all without you knowing you are being analyzed.

The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act was killed in the Senate. The House passed a bill in 2024 that would have required warrants for federal data broker purchases, 219–199. The Senate did not pass it. Every representative who voted NO in the House voted to preserve the government's ability to buy your location without a warrant. The Senate's failure to act means the practice continues indefinitely with no reform on the horizon.

Who Pushed This

No single political actor created this practice, which is part of why it has been so difficult to stop. It grew through procurement decisions made by career officials at DHS, ICE, CBP, the FBI, and IRS — bureaucrats whose names do not appear in news coverage but whose contract signatures built the surveillance infrastructure.

The data broker industry — Venntel, Babel Street, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, and others — has actively marketed their services to federal agencies, treating government contracts as a core revenue line. These companies profit directly from the absence of legal reform.

Palantir has built a substantial portion of its business on government contracts that depend on the continuation of warrantless data collection and AI analytics. Its $1 billion DHS contract in 2026 represents the industrialization of this entire system.

Congress enabled the practice by failing to pass reform legislation and by routinely approving DHS, DOD, and FBI appropriations that fund data broker purchases without restricting them.

Key Votes

Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (House, 2024): 219–199. This is the cleanest available vote on warrantless data broker surveillance. Every representative who voted NO voted to preserve the government's ability to buy your location data without a warrant. There is no ambiguity in that vote.

Annual DHS, DOD, and FBI appropriations. Every member who has voted for these agencies' budgets without restricting data broker purchases has voted to fund the surveillance. This is a less targeted screen, but pattern voting on appropriations with knowledge of the practice is relevant.

Senate inaction on the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act. Every senator who did not support moving the House-passed bill forward — whether by blocking committee consideration or failing to press for a floor vote — made a choice to leave the warrantless data purchase system in place.

Why This Matters for We The Citizens

The federal data broker system is mass warrantless surveillance of the American population, operating in plain sight, funded by agency procurement budgets, and defended by a legal fiction that your phone app's tracking is "voluntary." It tracks political activity, religious practice, protest attendance, and personal associations — the exact categories of behavior the First and Fourth Amendments exist to protect.

The $1 billion Palantir AI contract is the point of no return if it is not stopped. Once AI is processing your location history, mapping your associations, and flagging behavioral patterns at scale across all of DHS, the surveillance capability is effectively permanent. Contracts are renewed. Databases persist. Analytical models are refined and expanded.

A politician who voted NO on the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act voted to preserve all of this. They knew what the bill did. They had the chance to require warrants. They chose not to. That vote is on the record.

See also: Bad Laws Overview | Federal Social Media Monitoring | REAL ID Act | CISA 2015