Amid a broader effort to curb the electronic surveillance of citizens by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is aiming to shut the door on the government buying and searching through data on Americans obtained from commercial data brokers without court-approved warrants.
The effort is part of lawmakers’ pursuit of multiple paths to reauthorize expiring portions of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to collect communications of non-Americans located outside the country without a warrant.
Since Americans often communicate with those outside the country, the data collection also ends up sweeping information on citizens and allows the FBI and other agencies to search such data without a warrant, which some lawmakers and civil rights groups say is a violation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment prohibitions against such searches.
