One way to define US federal agencies – the FBI included – that obtain their citizens’ personal data by buying it from third-party data brokers is to say they are bypassing the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, meant to protect against unlawful searches.
And that is pretty much how Republican Congressman Andy Biggs – and he is not alone – sees the practice.
It seems the idea is to put an end to the thing by depriving it of the funds. On Thursday, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Government Surveillance and Crime was set to convene and consider the way the federal government has allegedly continuously pursued what its political opponents consider warrantless surveillance of Americans.
It is expected that the focus would be on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702- but the congressman exclusively revealed for Breitbart that there may be more items on that agenda.
It comes after the FBI came clean last month, after our previous reporting, to confirm that it did buy geolocation data, harvested through phone advertising (often seemingly innocuously embedded into apps) – although the under-fire agency said this was no longer the case today.
Where there’s the FBI location data buying controversy, there’s likely the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) somewhere in there, and, as information over the past few months has shown, and reports now suggest, the IRS is not far behind.
And how could any of that go without the Department of Justice (DoJ) getting dragged in?
House Republicans seem at once determined, and careful about how they go about all this: one of them, Ben Cline, apparently tried to get some information from the DoJ.
And now Biggs is saying that he and Cline conferred and concluded that this was something to “absolutely” be considered for an investigation.
Then there’s the question of basically, “How much (data) do you need, exactly? Aren’t you already inundated with people’s data?”
Or as Congressman Biggs put it, “It seems to me that there is a deliberate run around the Fourth Amendment, especially when you have these mountains of data that we already have stored at NSA, etc. They want these additional databases and the reality is that does not obviate them from getting a Fourth Amendment search warrant in my opinion.”
Well – regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s Judiciary Subcommittees’ work, the answer would seem to be – when it comes to people’s data, we’re no longer talking about hunger – we’re in the gluttony stage.
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