Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 90% certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Freckling: Law Enforcement Can Legally Buy Private Geolocation Data for Prosecutions

Dan Freckling · How a Cookie Invented in 94 Became the Monster Behind Your Data · Jan 24, 2023 · at 19:30

Dan Freckling, CEO of Boltive, discusses government surveillance and commercial ad tracking risks following the Dobbs Supreme Court decision.

0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.9s

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“It is legal for law enforcement to purchase private data that's collected this way through geo location, through search history and law enforcement can purchase that information and use it in prosecution without running a foul of the fourth amendment to unreasonable search and seizure.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

Law enforcement can legally purchase commercially collected private geolocation and search history data and use it in prosecution without violating the Fourth Amendment.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

As of January 2023, under prevailing United States statutory law and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, law enforcement agencies were legally permitted to purchase commercially available geolocation and digital telemetry data from private data brokers without a warrant and utilize it in investigations and prosecutions. While the Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States (2018) that acquiring cell-site location information (CSLI) via compulsory legal process requires a warrant, the ruling explicitly did not bar the government from purchasing commercially available data on the open market under the third-party doctrine. Furthermore, no statutory prohibition (such as the proposed Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act) had been enacted, and multiple federal agencies (including DHS components, the FBI, and the IRS) routinely procured and used commercial telemetry data from data brokers without a Fourth Amendment bar per se.

Supreme Court precedent in Carpenter v. United States (2018) was narrowly limited to compulsory acquisition of historical CSLI from telecommunications carriers, leaving voluntary commercial purchases unaddressed.
As of January 2023, neither the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) nor the Stored Communications Act (SCA) prohibited law enforcement agencies from purchasing data from commercial data brokers.
A declassified January 2022 ODNI Senior Advisory Group report and a September 2023 DHS OIG audit confirmed that intelligence and law enforcement agencies routinely purchased commercially available information (CAI), including device-level geolocation data, without warrants under existing legal interpretations.

Checked against

[1] egattorneys.com [2] reason.org [3] wiley.law [4] epic.org [5] reason.com [6] theguardian.com [7] ccianet.org [8] epic.org

law enforcement buy data broker geolocation search history Fourth Amendment legal status 2022 2023 law enforcement purchase commercial geolocation data Fourth Amendment third party doctrine 2023 ODNI report commercially available information January 2023 data brokers warrant Fourth Amendment DHS OIG commercial telemetry data warrantless geolocation purchase 2023

assessed as of 2026-09-02

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Mentioned

Fourth Amendment geolocation law enforcement

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