If you live in USAhe FBI I could be buying the data what do you leave in Internet to track you.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patelexplained on Wednesday that the agency is acquiring useful information to follow the movements and know the location of people, the first confirmation of this practice since his predecessor, Christopher Wraystated in 2023 that he had done so in the past.
“We acquire commercially available information that is consistent with the Constitution and the laws of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and this has provided us with information of intelligence valuable,” said Patel — a Trumpist lawyer and former deputy director of National Intelligence known for supporting the insurrection against the Capitol and for promoting all kinds of conspiracy theories— at a US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
Since 2018, the Supreme Court of the United States forces police authorities to obtain a court order for mobile phone operators to transfer data location of their clients. This intermediation of the courts guarantees that it is a proportional measure to investigate cases such as the terrorism o to sexual exploitation juvenile.
The National Director of Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, during an FBI search at the Operations Center of the Department of Registration and Elections in Fulton County, in the state of Georgia (USA) / ERIK S. LESSER / EFE
Who do you buy that information from?
However, there is also another way to access personal information without following a legal process. The FBI buys it from data brokers or data merchants, million-dollar companies whose business is based on collecting your digital trail—from credit card transactions to what you share on social networks— and sell it to third parties, as long as they are not foreign adversaries such as China, Russia o Iran.
Some lawmakers oppose that practice. This is the case of the Democratic senator Ron Wyden and the republican Mike Leewho last Friday presented the Government Surveillance Reform Act, a text that would force the FBI and other law enforcement or intelligence agencies to always have a court order to request access to those personal data of the citizens.
“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,” Wyden warned during Patel’s appearance before the Senate.
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