Unclassified memo: Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have used commercial databases of location data from smartphone apps to track Americans without warrants
The disclosure comes amid growing legislative scrutiny of how the government uses commercially available location records.
Context & Ripple Effects
This memo lands in a well-documented arc of agencies buying their way around the warrant process. The leaked dataset tracing 12M+ Americans' movements showed how easily 'anonymous' app location data de-anonymizes people; the IRS's purchase of a marketing database covering millions of cellphones extended the practice to domestic law enforcement, and Democratic senators' request that followed it triggered a DHS inspector general probe into warrantless tracking via brokered cellphone data.
What is new here is the intelligence-community dimension: an unclassified memo confirming DIA analysts themselves queried commercial location databases on Americans. Subsequent FOIA disclosures that US Treasury bought location and app data from Babel Street show the purchasing did not stop with one agency — and the Times notes the disclosure arrives amid growing legislative scrutiny.
First-order effects
- DIA analysts now have documented, on-the-record use of commercial location databases to track Americans without warrants, putting the agency directly in the path of the same congressional inquiry that produced the DHS IG probe.
- The lawmakers pressing DHS over brokered-data purchases gain a second named agency and a paper trail, strengthening the case that this is systemic rather than isolated.
Second-order effects
- Commercial location-data brokers face the prospect of becoming the choke point for reform: if agencies can be barred from buying what they cannot legally collect, the IRS, Treasury, and DHS purchases become test cases for where that line sits.
- App developers whose SDKs feed these databases inherit the exposure — the WSJ's reporting on geolocation harvested from common apps endangering intelligence officers shows the same supply chain cuts both ways.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Fourth Amendment fight shifts from government collection to government purchase, pressuring Congress to decide whether a warrant is required when the state buys data it could not seize — a structural question the leaked dataset, IRS, Treasury, and now DIA episodes all feed into.
- Sustained scrutiny risks forcing the ad-tech location market itself to segment, with domestic-government access either codified under due-process limits or cut off, reshaping who brokers can sell to.
The trend: Government agencies are substituting commercial data purchases for legal process, and each new disclosure — IRS, DHS, Treasury, now DIA — narrows the window before Congress regulates the brokerage market itself.