A look at a National Defense Authorization Act amendment, which if passed would forbid US government agencies from buying citizens' search histories and more
An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act would forbid government entities from buying Americans' search histories, location data, and more. Bluesky: @dell.bsky.social . Mastodon: @danielschuman@mastodon.social . Twitter: @warrendavidson , @repthomasmassie , and @demandprogress Bluesky: Dell Cameron / @dell.bsky.social : New by me: — US spies are buying up Americans' private phone data. Congress has just been given (yet another) chance to stop it. — https://www.wired.com/... Mastodon: Daniel Schuman / @danielschuman@mastodon.social : If you care about a women's ability to obtain an abortion, you should care about anti-choice prosecutors buying their location data from data brokers. That bread crumb trail leads to jail, or worse. — The fix is to require a warrant. Here's how to close a loophole that endangers women everywhere. … Twitter: Warren Davidson / @warrendavidson : Warrantless mass surveillance infringes the Constitutionally protected right to privacy. Our amendment prevents the government from circumventing the 4th amendment by prohibiting data purchases from big tech that would otherwise require a warrant. https://www.wired.com/... Thomas Massie / @repthomasmassie : 👍🇺🇸Thank you @WarrenDavidson for leading this effort to rein in warrantless government surveillance. https://twitter.com/... @demandprogress : There's nothing stopping prosecutors in states that have banned reproductive health care from buying lists of each person who has gone to an abortion clinic — or mosque, rehab, or protest. This is an existential threat to privacy and must stop: https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This amendment is the latest move in a long-running fight over whether agencies can buy their way around warrant requirements. The paper trail is well established: data broker Mobilewalla admitted in a letter to Sen. Wyden that it supplied data used by the DHS, IRS, and US military for warrantless device tracking, and Congress rejected a warrantless browser-history access bill back in 2016 by the narrowest of margins.
The stakes are visible in what followed: the NSA is reported to be lobbying against the amendment, and the Senate separately moved to reauthorize FISA's Section 702 via RISAA, keeping the warrant-versus-purchase question alive across multiple legislative vehicles at once.
First-order effects
- If passed, agencies including the DHS, IRS, and military would lose the broker workaround Mobilewalla's letter documented, forcing them to seek court warrants for search histories, location, and phone data.
- Data brokers would lose a reliable government revenue stream, and the amendment's sponsors — Reps. Davidson and Massie among them — gain a rare bipartisan surveillance-reform vehicle on a must-pass defense bill.
Second-order effects
- The NSA's lobbying against the amendment, per the later reporting, sets up a direct fight inside the NDAA conference, where intelligence-community priorities have historically stripped similar riders.
- Agencies facing a purchase ban would likely lean harder on surveillance tooling vendors like ShadowDragon, whose social-media aggregation products already serve ICE, the State Department, and the DEA — shifting the market from raw broker data to packaged monitoring tools.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a judicial backstop: a US district judge has already ruled the FBI's warrantless 'backdoor' searches of Section 702 databases violate the Fourth Amendment, so if Congress won't close the purchase loophole, courts may constrain adjacent practices instead.
- Repeated near-misses — the 2016 browser-history vote, this amendment, the RISAA fight — suggest the broker-data loophole is becoming the defining fault line of US surveillance law, with each defense bill a fresh test of whether procurement law or the warrant clause governs Americans' data.
The trend: US surveillance law is converging on a single question — whether agencies can buy what they cannot legally compel — with each defense-authorization cycle forcing another vote on the broker loophole.