Civics: The government needs a warrant to spy on you. So agencies are paying tech companies to do it instead.
But governments are increasingly circumventing these protections by using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to spy on citizens. Government agencies have found many creative and enterprising ways to skirt the Fourth Amendment.
Cellphones generate reams of information about us even when they’re just in our pockets, including revealing our geographical locations—information that is then sold by third-party brokers. In 2017 and 2018, the IRS Criminal Investigation unit (IRS CI) purchased access to a commercial database containing geolocation data from millions of Americans’ cellphones. A spokesman said IRS CI only used the data for “significant money-laundering, cyber, drug and organized-crime cases” and
terminated the contract when it failed to yield any useful leads.
