House Appropriations Committee Advances Privacy Protections Against Data Brokers and AI Surveillance

The House Appropriations Committee took a big step toward closing one of the most dangerous loopholes in modern surveillance practices. On Wednesday, lawmakers adopted an amendment by Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) that would prohibit the government from buying Americans’ sensitive personal data from data brokers without judicial oversight.
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The amendment mirrors the bipartisan Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, legislation previously passed by the House in 2024 with strong support from members of both parties. 

The issue is straightforward: Federal agencies increasingly obtain Americans’ location histories, browser records, app usage, and other sensitive digital information by purchasing them from private data brokers rather than seeking a warrant from a judge. This practice is an end-run around the Fourth Amendment.

And yet, this is a common practice in the federal government. Agencies from the FBI to the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense routinely use commercially available data to obtain information that otherwise would require a judge-issued warrant. 

PPSA has long opposed these practices and supported reforms aimed at curbing warrantless surveillance. Our efforts have focused not only on traditional government data collection but also on the rapidly growing ability of artificial intelligence systems to aggregate and analyze commercially purchased data into detailed personal dossiers.

“AI tools can now synthesize purchased location records, browsing behavior, buying history, social media activity, and other streams of data into comprehensive profiles of Americans’ lives, associations, religious practices, political activity, and daily routines,” said Bob Goodlatte, former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and Senior Policy Advisor to PPSA. “A government agency that cannot legally compel a person to turn over information directly should not be able to purchase it indirectly from a data broker.”

The “data broker loophole” has become one of the defining privacy controversies of the digital age. As multiple civil liberties groups and lawmakers have noted, the government increasingly treats commercially available data as exempt from constitutional scrutiny, even when that same data reveals the whole of a person’s movements and activities. 

The bipartisan concern surrounding this issue has been building for years. The original Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act drew support from lawmakers as ideologically diverse as Reps. Warren Davidson, Jerry Nadler, Thomas Massie, and Zoe Lofgren, as well as Sens. Mike Lee, Ron Wyden, and Rand Paul. 

In 2024, the House passed this legislation by a bipartisan vote of 219-199. 

Now the Espaillat amendment revives that effort, marking continued momentum for privacy protections, especially in the current debates over Section 702 surveillance authority in Congress.

“Most heartening of all, the House Appropriations Committee’s actions show that support for surveillance reform is broad, deep, and bipartisan,” Goodlatte said. “At stake is a basic constitutional principle – the federal government should not be allowed to pull out its wallet and buy its way around the Bill of Rights.”

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