FBI Director Confirms Bureau Is Buying Private Data To Track Americans

FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed in a Senate hearing on Wednesday, "We do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us." In 2023, the last FBI director claimed that such practices were no longer in place, but with a new administration in place, that policy has apparently changed.

This quote was confirmed by Politico, who also pointed out that lawmakers are currently opposing the practice and introducing the bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would require law enforcement and federal agencies to acqurie a warrant for information like this. "Doing that without a warrant is an outrageous end run around the Fourth Amendment, (and) it's particularly dangerous given the use of artificial intelligence to comb through massive amounts of private information," said Senator Ron Wyden at the same Wednesday Senate hearing.


In light of recent news like Anthropic being deemed a security risk for refusing to lift the guardrails on its Claude AI and Microsoft being forced to cough up BitLocker decryption keys to the FBI, this is yet another bit of distasteful news. A general skepticism shared by Americans across the political spectrum has long suspected large-scale, warrantless surveillance by the FBI and other federal agencies—which was effectively confirmed with bombshells like PRISM and various NSA surveillance projects that have been exposed.

The most surprising part of Politico's report isn't that the FBI is buying from shady data brokers—it's that it may have stopped doing so previously. Committee Chair Tom Cotton does defend the practice by pointing out that "The key words are commercially available. If any other person can buy it, and the FBI can buy it, and it helps them locate a depraved child molester or savage cartel leader, I would certainly hope the FBI is doing anything it can to keep Americans safe."

Your thoughts on that specific argument may vary, but it underlines a key fact regardless of whether or not the FBI continues these practices. In today's era of data brokers and advanced spyware solutions, not only has most of your data probably already been collected, but that same data is constantly being sold and re-sold throughout the black and gray markets without your consent.