1. United States
2. Colo.
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to pass comprehensive legislation banning federal agencies from purchasing Americans' personal data from commercial data brokers without a warrant. Right now, federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, the FBI, and the Department of Defense routinely buy bulk datasets containing the location history, web browsing activity, and personal information of millions of Americans from companies like LexisNexis, Babel Street, and Thomson Reuters. These purchases allow the government to sidestep the Fourth Amendment protections that would normally require a court-approved warrant to obtain this data. This is not a hypothetical concern. Exposed contracts show that agencies spend tens of millions of dollars annually on commercial data subscriptions that track where people go, who they communicate with, and what they do online. A 2023 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the government purchases data that is "more revealing" than what agencies could legally intercept through surveillance. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act and the Government Surveillance Reform Act both address this gap. I urge you to advance legislation that prohibits federal agencies from purchasing personal data that would otherwise require a warrant to obtain, requires judicial authorization before agencies can access commercial datasets containing location, communications, or browsing data on U.S. persons, mandates public disclosure of all existing data broker contracts held by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and establishes penalties for agencies that circumvent these requirements. This is a bipartisan issue. Americans across the political spectrum oppose warrantless government surveillance. Please act to close this loophole before it is normalized further.