FBI Director Patel Confirms Under Oath the Bureau Purchases Commercially Available Data, Declining to Commit to a Warrant Requirement

On March 18, 2026, testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed that the Bureau “purchases commercially available information,” and — asked directly whether he would commit to not buying Americans’ location data without a warrant — declined to do so.

The statement is significant on three counts:

1. It reverses prior FBI testimony. Patel’s predecessor told Congress in 2023 in terms that left the Bureau’s reliance on purchased commercial data ambiguous or denied; Patel’s confirmation makes the practice official and on the record.

2. It confirms the “data-broker loophole” at the highest level. Carpenter v. United States (2018) held that the government needs a warrant to compel long stretches of phone location data from a third party. It said nothing clear about what the government may buy. Agencies — CBP (airline flight records via a broker, under a contract barring naming the source), ICE (the Thomson Reuters CLEAR utility database; 1M+ LexisNexis searches in a seven-month 2021 stretch) — have exploited that gap by purchasing what they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. Patel’s admission confirms the FBI is part of that pattern.

3. It is the live news peg for the legislative fix. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would ban the government from buying the data it would otherwise need a warrant to get, passed the House 219–199 in April 2024 but died in the Senate and (as of mid-2026) has not been reintroduced. Patel’s confirmation is the kind of on-record government admission that re-opens the case for it.

Part of the same March-2026 news cluster as the CDT/Anthropic disclosure (the Pentagon’s interest in commercial bulk data; see related event).