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The Shopping Cart
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the Surveillance State(s) hub.
The Shopping Cart
Congress banned bulk metadata collection in 2015. Then federal agencies opened a purchase order and bought the same picture of Americans' lives from a commercial data broker — no warrant required.
After the USA FREEDOM Act ended the NSA's bulk telephone-metadata program in 2015, federal agencies did not give up the data — they started buying it. That the FBI, the DIA, CBP, ICE and the Secret Service purchased Americans' location and device data from commercial brokers, without warrants, is documented by the intelligence community's own declassified review, a DIA memo, the DHS Inspector General, and the FBI director under oath. The purchases are FACT. Whether buying the data sidesteps the Fourth Amendment is the live legal question this deck is careful not to answer for the courts.
The record is primary, not press-driven: a declassified ODNI panel report, a signed DIA memo to Sen. Wyden, a federal watchdog report (DHS OIG-23-61), and sworn Senate testimony. The deck stages those as the evidentiary floor. What it refuses to launder up to that bar: We are NOT asserting that the government is individually tracking every American in real time — the documented record is that agencies acquire and can query the data, not that everyone is under active surveillance; that framing is posed as a question (SOME_SMOKE), not a finding. We are NOT declaring the purchases settled to be unconstitutional — Carpenter (2018) governs compelled production from carriers, not voluntary commercial sales, and no court has squarely resolved the purchase question; the 'it bypasses the Fourth Amendment' framing is graded PROBABLY_TRUE, a well-founded position but not a decided one. And whether 'commercially available' has become a durable loophole for reconstituting the bulk surveillance Congress banned is a question we pose, not a verdict we deliver.
June 2015 to March 2026 — from the ban on bulk collection to the FBI director defending the workaround under oath.
The number of federal agencies whose broker purchases rest on a PRIMARY document or sworn testimony — the FBI (Director Patel's March 2026 sworn admission), the DIA (its January 2021 memo to Wyden), and CBP, ICE and the Secret Service (the DHS Inspector General's OIG-23-61). The caption's job is grade discipline: reporting has also tied the DEA and the IRS Criminal Investigation unit to broker data, but the entries this page stands on rest on primary documents and testimony, not press accounts. Five is the documented count. It is not the reporting-tier total.
On March 18, 2026, FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed under oath that the bureau buys Americans' commercially available data — and, asked directly by Sen. Wyden to commit to stopping, declined.
This is the punchline and the newest anchor of the FACT spine. At a Senate Intelligence Committee 'Worldwide Threats' hearing, Patel confirmed the FBI purchases commercially available information it considers lawful and said it has produced valuable intelligence — and would not agree to end the practice. The significance is not merely that the FBI buys the data; it is that the bureau's director defended it on the record and refused a direct request to stop. It is a documented shift from 2023, when then-Director Christopher Wray told Congress the FBI had used commercial location data in the past but was not then doing so. The exchange was widely reported the same day and traces to the committee's own hearing record.
The reform banned the collection, not the buying: agencies obtained functionally equivalent data — phone location histories, device identifiers, internet-activity records — by purchasing it from brokers rather than collecting it under legal process. The mechanism changed from 'collect' to 'buy'; the data did not.
This is the through-line the rest of the record documents agency by agency. The USA FREEDOM Act ended the NSA's bulk telephone-metadata program under Section 215 but did not regulate the commercial data-broker market that had grown up alongside the surveillance state. Brokers aggregate location pings, device identifiers and browsing records harvested from apps and ad networks, and will sell to a government customer with a credit card and no court order. The ODNI's own declassified CAI report describes the intelligence community increasingly buying this information in lieu of collecting it — the workaround hiding in plain sight.
Buying the data 'substantially bypasses' the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement.
This is the grade-discipline centerpiece, held one notch below FACT on purpose. In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court held the government generally needs a warrant to obtain historical cell-site location information from a carrier, because a person keeps a reasonable expectation of privacy in the record of their movements even when a third party holds it. The strong argument — made by Sen. Wyden, the ACLU, EPIC and others — is that letting agencies simply buy the same location data from a broker sidesteps that ruling and reconstitutes warrantless tracking by other means. That argument is serious and, in our judgment, likely correct in spirit. But it is legal analysis, not settled law: Carpenter addressed compelled production from carriers, not voluntary commercial sales, and no court has squarely and finally resolved whether purchasing broker location data is itself a Fourth Amendment search. Agencies like the DIA argue expressly that it is not. Until the Supreme Court says otherwise, 'buying it bypasses the Fourth Amendment' is a well-founded position — not a decided one.
The documentary spine — the IC's own review and two primary documents, not press accounts.
- 2021 → June 2023 — DNI Avril Haines convened an ODNI Senior Advisory Group panel to study the IC's use of commercially available information; its report (classified Jan. 2022, declassified June 2023) found the IC buys a large and growing volume of CAI, including sensitive location data, and frequently cannot say how much it holds, of what type, or what it does with it. [FACT]
- Jan 15, 2021 — the DIA told Sen. Wyden it buys commercial smartphone-location data, funds another agency to purchase it, filters U.S. device locations into a separate database, and permits analysts to query Americans' movements — stating it 'does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant.' [FACT]
- Sept 2023 — DHS OIG-23-61 found CBP, ICE and the Secret Service purchased and used Commercial Telemetry Data without adhering to DHS privacy policies or completing the Privacy Impact Assessments the E-Government Act requires; one CBP employee used the data to track coworkers with no investigative purpose. [FACT]
“We do purchase commercially available information that is consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act — and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us.”
The record-vs-narrative fault line, in the bureau director's own sworn words. This is the moment the FBI stopped describing the purchases as a past practice and defended them as a present one — asked by Sen. Wyden to commit to stopping, Patel declined. It is quoted verbatim, sourced to the contemporaneous record of the hearing, and not paraphrased into something he did not say. His framing that the purchases are 'consistent with the Constitution' is exactly the claim the deck grades PROBABLY_TRUE, not FACT — a court has not decided it.
What the record settles, and what stays open.
- Federal agencies — the FBI, DIA, CBP, ICE and the Secret Service — bought Americans' location/device data from commercial brokers without warrants, documented by the IC's own declassified review, a DIA memo, DHS OIG-23-61, and sworn FBI testimony.
- The IC's own panel found agencies buy a growing volume of commercially available information, including sensitive location data, and often cannot account for what they hold.
- On March 18, 2026, the FBI director confirmed the purchases under oath and declined a direct request to stop.
- Whether buying broker location data is itself a Fourth Amendment search — Carpenter governs compelled production from carriers; the purchase question is unresolved, and agencies argue it does not reach.
- Whether every American is under active, individualized real-time tracking — the record shows acquisition and query capability, not universal surveillance.
- Whether 'commercially available' has become a permanent loophole for the bulk surveillance Congress banned — posed as a question, not a finding.
The government's own full accounting of how much commercially available data it has purchased on Americans, of what type, and what it does with it does not exist in the public record — and, by the IC panel's own admission, may not exist at all.
The ODNI's declassified CAI report did not merely find that agencies buy this data; it found they frequently cannot say how much they hold, of what kind, or how it is used. That is the signature gap: the missing record here is not a court ruling or a broker's name — it is the inventory the buyers themselves have never assembled. What would fill this line is an IC-wide and DHS-wide audit of every commercial-data contract, feed and query on U.S. persons — the kind of accounting that reaches an off-the-books procurement channel only through a compelled disclosure or a sustained oversight demand, not a press release. Distinct from the two index open_questions below (which brokers hold the largest contracts; whether any court has ruled post-Carpenter).
Help us fill it →Why it matters now.
The warrant is the hinge of the Fourth Amendment: before the state builds a record of where you go and who you see, it is supposed to convince a neutral judge it has cause. Bulk metadata collection was ended because it inverted that rule — surveillance first, suspicion later, or never. The data-broker workaround threatens to restore the inversion through the market: the same intimate record of a life, obtained not with a court order but with a purchase order. It is not abstract. The commercial-location pipeline is central to how immigration enforcement locates people — see Policing the Poor — and it runs on a data-broker industry that profits by turning private movement into a product, where Self-Dealing picks it up; it is one more front in the fight over who gets to know what about whom, examined in Dangerous Knowledge. This page's contribution is one discipline: grade the purchases FACT, the constitutional verdict PROBABLY_TRUE, and the 'permanent loophole' question SOME_SMOKE — and let the Surveillance States archive carry the larger question of whether a banned capability was ever truly retired, or merely repriced.
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenWhich specific data brokers hold the largest federal law-enforcement contracts, and how are their data sets assembled?
- OpenHave any federal courts substantively ruled on the constitutional exposure of the commercial-data pathway since Carpenter v. United States?