 The Securities and Exchange Commission is charged with policing securities markets. It is not an intelligence agency. So why was it secretly monitoring the air travel of people under investigation? Collin Mercer of Tech Times reports that newly released documents show the SEC purchased access to the Travel Intelligence Program, a massive airline-ticket database maintained by the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC). ARC is a clearinghouse that processes transactions between airlines and travel agencies. This gives it access to passenger names, credit card numbers, flight numbers, travel dates, and departure and arrival cities. Its database contained more than one billion records, including information about flights between foreign countries. The SEC did not merely search historical records. It subscribed to a surveillance service that automatically compared new bookings against the agency’s watchlists. Whenever a listed individual purchased a ticket, the SEC could receive an alert within 24 hours. The agency requested the ability to receive between one and 25 such alerts a day. No warrant was required, nor did a judge review whether the surveillance was justified. The SEC may have used this information to investigate insider trading or determine whether two people suspected of exchanging confidential information had traveled to the same place. This form of tracking could have provided complementary evidence in cases flagged by ARTEMIS, the SEC’s data analytics platform that sifts through six billion trading records to identify transactions that have the hallmarks of insider trading. But a plausible investigative purpose does not erase the Fourth Amendment. If the government wants to track someone’s movements, it should demonstrate probable cause to a judge. As PPSA has reported, ARC’s government customers have also included Customs and Border Protection, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Transportation Security Administration, the State Department, the U.S. Marshals Service, and the IRS. The SEC’s participation demonstrates the limitless nature of the data-broker loophole: If one federal agency can purchase sensitive information without judicial review, virtually any agency can. ARC ended the Travel Intelligence Program in 2025 after its surveillance activities attracted public and congressional scrutiny. But the legal loophole that enabled the program remains open, and other vendors can offer similar services. Nor does the end of TIP mean that suspects will be informed that they were targeted. Since the SEC brings civil enforcement actions, rather than criminal prosecutions, it is not obligated to turn over exculpatory evidence to the people it charges the way prosecutors must. So people whose travel was tracked by the SEC while TIP was in play may never learn that their personal data was used to bring a case against them. The SEC should fill in the blanks by disclosing how it used ARC’s information, whether that data remains in government systems, and whether it has purchased comparable information from other brokers. It should then formally renounce this practice. While this SEC practice appears to have been curbed, at least a dozen other federal agencies – including the FBI, the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon – are still purchasing Americans’ digital data, including search histories and communications metadata, from shady third-party data brokers for unknown uses. Congress should investigate and inform the American people about how our government uses and abuses our purchased data. Comments are closed.
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