Several leaders in the House of Representatives are probing federal law enforcement over the practice of gathering citizen data through private data sets.
Members of the Judiciary Committee sent a letter on Tuesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, as well as leaders from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies, about data practices. The letter specifically requests information on the agencies’ practice of acquiring private data sets through brokers, evading the need for a warrant to investigate private citizens.
DHS AND ICE PURCHASED VAST QUANTITIES OF CELLPHONE LOCATION DATA: ACLU
“Recent investigative reports indicate that many law enforcement agencies—including yours—have purchased data or licenses through relationships with data brokers, instead of obtaining it through statutory authorities, court order, or legal process,” wrote House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) in the letter.
The letter arrived a month after a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, at which privacy researcher Sarah Lamdan noted that data provided by brokers “turn policing from a suspect-focused search into a constant, intrusive surveillance system that surveils all of us. Rather than focusing on particular suspects, data policing tools are dragnets, sifting through all of our data.” The letter drew attention to the broker LexisNexis, which has contracts with 1,300 local and state law enforcement agencies across the United States.
Nadler and Thompson requested a joint briefing on the topic, as well as documents regarding the contracts with data brokers, legal analysis of the brokered data, and details about the parameters of said data acquisition. The agencies have until Aug. 30 to provide the paperwork to Congress.
The letter arrived a month after the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that agencies like ICE and DHS had purchased mass quantities of cellphone location data without seeking a necessary warrant.
The sale of mass data to federal agencies is a breach of Carpenter v. United States, according to the ACLU. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that government agencies must have a warrant to access someone’s cell location data due to the “privacies of life” that such data can reveal.
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The ACLU advocates that Congress pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, legislation submitted by 20 senators and co-sponsored by Nadler in April 2021 that would stop data brokers from selling personal information to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
