WASHINGTON — Amid a broader effort to curb the electronic surveillance of citizens by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is aiming to shut the door on the government buying and searching through data on Americans obtained from commercial data brokers without court-approved warrants.
The effort is part of lawmakers’ pursuit of multiple paths to reauthorize expiring portions of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to collect communications of non-Americans located outside the country without a warrant.
Since Americans often communicate with those outside the country, the data collection also ends up sweeping information on citizens and allows the FBI and other agencies to search such data without a warrant, which some lawmakers and civil rights groups say is a violation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment prohibitions against such searches.
Lawmakers are primarily focused on trying to stop the FBI and spy agencies from using Section 702 of the surveillance law to search Americans’ data without a warrant in the databases of electronic communications collected from around the globe by the National Security Agency.
But a bipartisan group is also aiming to shut down a back door not governed under any law: U.S. agencies buying vast quantities of data from commercial brokers that collect the information from mobile phones and apps as well as online searches, maps and other data from just about every American.
Privacy and civil liberties advocates say Congress must fix both loopholes to safeguard Americans’ rights.
“We think that’s absolutely critical,” said Noah Chauvin, a counsel in the Liberty and National Security program of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.
Even if Congress tightens warrant requirements under Section 702, “there are a number of authorities that the intelligence…
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