On March 18, 2026, Senator Ron Wyden sat across from FBI Director Kash Patel in a Senate hearing room and asked a direct question: would the Director commit to stopping the FBI's practice of purchasing Americans' location data from commercial data brokers without a warrant?

Patel declined.

The exchange, confirmed by TechCrunch reporting on the hearing, produced an unusual moment: a Republican-appointed FBI director and a Democratic senator face to face over a surveillance practice that neither party's base finds acceptable — and the director defending a workaround that the Supreme Court effectively outlawed, in spirit, in 2018.

Congress returns from recess April 13. FISA Section 702 expires April 20. Seven working days.

The Warrant the Government Doesn't Need

In Carpenter v. United States (2018), the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that law enforcement must obtain a warrant before accessing cell phone location data from wireless carriers. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that cell site location information "provides an intimate window into a person's life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations." Getting that data required probable cause, a judge, and a warrant.

The FBI found a different window.

Data brokers — companies that aggregate and resell personal data collected from apps, devices, and commercial databases — are not wireless carriers. They collect the same location information, and they sell it. The government's legal position is that Carpenter doesn't apply to purchased commercial data. If the information is for sale on the open market, the government argues, it doesn't need a warrant to buy it.

The FBI signed a contract worth up to $27 million with Babel Street for 5,000 licenses to its "Locate X" product, which provides cell phone location data sourced from commercial apps, according to reporting by WebProNews and Android Headlines. The FBI performs approximately 200,000 warrantless searches of Americans' data per year, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The FBI is not alone. The Department of Homeland Security has purchased cell phone location data since at least 2017, according to the DHS Inspector General. In February 2026, DHS signed a $1 billion contract with Palantir to deploy AI-powered data analytics across all its components, according to reporting by Nextgov/FCW. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses a tool called Penlink "Webloc" to track mobile phones and maintains a separate $30 million contract with Palantir for a system called "ImmigrationOS," according to federal procurement records reported by Axios. The IRS Criminal Investigation division has purchased location data from Venntel, a data broker subsidiary of Gravy Analytics, according to reporting by The Intercept.

The Bipartisan Response

The Government Surveillance Reform Act — introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), with companion legislation from Representatives Warren Davidson (R-OH) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) — would require the federal government to obtain a court-authorized warrant before purchasing sensitive personal data from data brokers. The bill would close what its sponsors describe as the "data broker loophole": the gap that allows agencies to buy what they cannot legally collect.

Lee is one of the Senate's most consistent constitutional conservatives. Davidson represents a competitive Ohio district. Their participation is significant: this is not a surveillance reform effort driven by civil libertarians alone. It is a bipartisan recognition that the Fourth Amendment's protections do not disappear because a private company collected the data first.

"The federal government is purchasing Americans' personal data from private brokers," Wyden said in a statement introducing the legislation. "That's a gaping loophole that allows agencies to buy surveillance capabilities they couldn't legally acquire any other way."

The White House and House Speaker Mike Johnson are currently pushing for a "clean" reauthorization of FISA Section 702 — an extension with no reforms and no changes to the data broker loophole. Advocates for the Government Surveillance Reform Act are pushing to attach the data broker provisions to whatever reauthorization bill moves in the next ten days.

What Section 702 Has to Do With It

FISA Section 702 authorizes surveillance of non-U.S. persons abroad — but the program also sweeps in Americans' communications when they interact with foreign targets. It expires April 20.

The connection to the data broker loophole is structural: both represent situations where the government has found ways to access Americans' private communications and movements without the warrant the Fourth Amendment was designed to require. Reformers argue that any 702 reauthorization that doesn't close the data broker loophole is a half-measure — it addresses one surveillance channel while leaving the commercial purchase workaround intact.

The Brennan Center for Justice has documented that the number of Section 702 queries targeting Americans has increased sharply in recent years. The FBI conducted approximately 200,000 such queries in a single year, according to EPIC, searching collected data for information about U.S. persons without individual warrants.

The Constitutional Principle

The Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches was written in response to a specific abuse: general warrants that allowed British officials to search colonists' homes and papers without specifying what they were looking for or why. The Founders' concern was not limited to physical searches — it was about preventing the government from conducting suspicion-free surveillance of its citizens.

Cell phone location data is a detailed record of a person's movements, associations, and private life. The Supreme Court recognized this in Carpenter. The question that Congress faces in the next ten days is whether that recognition means anything when commercial intermediaries are standing between the government and the data it wants.

FBI Director Patel's answer, under oath, is that it doesn't. Congress has until April 20 to decide whether it agrees.

The Government Surveillance Reform Act has been introduced. Whether leadership brings it to a vote — or allows a clean 702 extension to pass over its objections — will determine whether the Carpenter decision means what the Supreme Court said it meant.