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The Feds Are Skirting the 4th Amendment by Buying Data from Tech Companies
The government needs a warrant to spy on you. So agencies are paying tech companies to do it instead.
That right extends to the digital sphere: The Supreme Court ruled in 2018's Carpenter v. United States that the government must have a warrant to track people's movements through their cellphone data. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) admitted in a January 2021 memo that it purchases "commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones" and that it had searched the database for Americans' movement histories "five times in the past two-and-a-half years." The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spent millions of dollars paying employees at private companies and government agencies for personal information that would otherwise require a warrant.
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