House Intel Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes (D-CT) last Friday said that he was “not aware” of the National Security Agency (NSA) purchasing Americans’ private communications despite years of reporting about the intelligence community purchasing Americans’ private information.
Privacy activists protested outside a town hall after the Democrat congressman spoke about the alleged need to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without significant reforms to the program.
Section 702 is a surveillance authority meant to be used to spy on foreign adversaries; however, Americans’ private communications incidentally get surveilled without a warrant contrary to the Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless surveillance. The surveillance authority will expire on April 20 if Congress does not pass a bill reauthorizing the legislation.
Reports suggested Himes said that intelligence agencies such as the NSA do not purchase Americans’ commercial data through Section 702.
He added, “I am not aware of any NSA purchases of U.S. person data, and because their targets, by law, are exclusively foreign, they… have no reason and no business buying American data.”
The New York Times reported in 2024 that the NSA buys logs of Americans’ domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers, as revealed by an unclassified letter to the director of national intelligence from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a staunch privacy advocate.
“The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans’ privacy are not just unethical, but illegal,” Wyden wrote, contending that intelligence communities should stop buying internet data if it was not collected under the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) standard for purchasing location data records.
On the other side of the aisle, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), another chief privacy advocate, said of Himes’ claims about government purchases of Americans’ data, “Claiming the federal government doesn’t purchase Americans’ data is just blatantly untrue. The FBI admitted to it under oath last month.”
During a Capitol Hill hearing, FBI Director Kash Patel said that the FBI is buying information via data brokers that could track people’s movement and location data.
“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,” Patel said.
The Government Surveillance Reform Act is backed by Sens. Wyden, Mike Lee (R-OH), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Reps. Davidson and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) back the legislation.
“Every American should be concerned that the FBI can purchase their private data without a warrant. Your right to privacy is not for sale — my Government Surveillance Reform Act requires the federal government to get a warrant before accessing your data,” Davidson said in March about his legislation that would reauthorize Section 702 while instituting reforms to require a warrant to purchase American data through data brokers.
