03 Mar 2026 Search

In the news: CBP Tapped Into the Online Advertising Ecosystem To Track Peoples’ Movements.

“By refusing to cut off surveillance companies and sleazy data brokers, Big Tech companies are effectively collaborating with ICE’s lawless campaign of violence and terror. As a result, every internet ad on a website or app could be collecting location data that ICE will use for its next operation,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement. “Congress could put a stop to this by passing my bills to ban the government from buying our data and ban tech companies from using surveillance advertising.

The problem with that is that is that it only covers one government, and people in the USA are under threat from many of them. Even though we technically have a Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024, it’s not too hard to hide the ownership of a company here, and even if the owners aren’t foreign adversaries, foreign secret agents can get hired as SREs or DBAs with access to data. Anything that the government here can buy, foreign countries can buy. (And they can probably get a better price on it.) And an adversary-owned company has no obligation to disclose anything. Even if every possible data seller reads and heeds Ad Tech Says It’s Not In The Surveillance Business. Now Is The Time To Prove It by Allison Schiff, if a company is selling data, some of it will go to hostile buyers.

That means Senator Wyden is looking at the problem from the wrong end. Governments here should buy more data. We won’t get useful legislation out of the Federal government for now, but the problem can be addressed at the state level. The way to protect people is to fund some non-lethal uses of the surveillance data market, in order to incentivize the private sector to clean up. States need to fund some clever (including shell companies if necessary) programs to..

  • Identify expensive lifestyle habits (such as high-end retail and destination resorts) by people who pay little in taxes.

  • Track vehicle owners/drivers for automatic speed enforcement.

Obviously people are going to complain about those. But that’s the point. Better for a few people to get speeding tickets—because some family member was playing a game on their mobile device on a road trip, and got tracked—than for the country to remain vulnerable to a targeted drone strike on key military and defense manufacturing people.

People don’t want to be surveilled by their own government for speeding and tax enforcement, but they want the country to be vulnerable to attack even less. The only timeline in which we’re safe from a wave of targeted drone strikes is the timeline where tax and speed enforcement based on aggressive, clever data buying don’t work.

In reality, state legislative hearings about using surveillance data for tax and speed enforcement would drive a lot of companies to clean up, or pivot to some win-win use of their Big Data skills. And even if you’re only concerned about our own government surveillance, it would be relatively easy for an agency here to work with an agency in some other country, in such a way that the agency here technically never buys data, just gets copied on reports from abroad. Protection needs to be more deeply coded into the system, and affect more governments than just one.

(Update 18 Mar 2026): Not just ICE. FBI is buying data that can be used to track people, Patel says. FBI and DIA directors both confirmed that their agencies buy “commercially available information”.

More: Surveillance risks and the TIDALWAVE report