After two senators' inquiry into warrantless tracking by the IRS, the agency is being investigated for its use of location info from data brokers
Context & Ripple Effects
This investigation is the direct consequence of the IRS's own admission in June 2020 that it bought access to a marketing database holding location data for millions of US cellphones to identify and track criminal suspects — a purchase that sidestepped the warrant requirement that would apply to any conventional surveillance. Two senators' inquiry turned that disclosure into formal scrutiny, and the agency is now being investigated over exactly those brokered-data practices.
The IRS is not an outlier in the coverage arc: the DHS inspector general later opened its own probe of warrantless tracking via purchased data after Senate requests, FOIA records showed the Treasury buying app-derived location feeds from Babel Street, and broker Mobilewalla confirmed in a letter to Sen. Wyden that it supplied data used by the DHS, IRS, and US military.
First-order effects
- The IRS must now answer investigators for how its marketing-database purchases were authorized and used, with the senators' inquiry giving the review political teeth rather than leaving it an internal matter.
Second-order effects
- Parallel agencies face the same pressure: the DHS inspector general's probe of warrantless brokered-data tracking followed the same senator-driven template, and suppliers like Mobilewalla are pulled into the open as named sources of government location feeds.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural issue is that agencies can buy their way around due-process restrictions on surveillance through commercial brokers — pointing toward regulation of the data-broker market itself as the chokepoint, since each new probe (IRS, DHS, Treasury, ICE's dossier-building) targets the same procurement channel.
The trend: US government agencies are systematically substituting commercially brokered cellphone location data for court-authorized surveillance, and congressional inquiries are converting each disclosure into successive investigations.