Quote of the Day
The FBI is buying up information that can be used to track people’s movement and location history, Director Kash Patel said during a Senate hearing Wednesday.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has required law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant for getting people’s location data from cell phone providers since 2018, but data brokers offer an alternative avenue by purchasing the information directly.
Alfred Ng
March 18, 2026
FBI is buying data that can be used to track people, Patel says – POLITICO
And with your location information they know things about you even your closest friends do not know. Even if you are couch surfing trying to avoid giving up your location, they know where you live. They know if you were in the vicinity of that January 6th riot. They know if you were scouting the house where four University of Idaho students were murdered. They know you visit the gay bath house a couple times a month when you tell your wife you are working late. They know you are part of the “Underground Railroad” for slaves/wetbacks/Jews/dads-with-child-custody problems.
We live in interesting times.
Surveillance state has been with us for a while. Volume of data points provided some protection unless TPTB were specifically interested in you. AI, of course, eliminates that protection since it has the capacity to crunch infinite volumes of data. Watching John Correia’s self-defense videos, I have been struck by the enormous quantity of surveillance cameras out there. That data can also be crunched. It cuts both ways though. Badge cams have mostly justified police deadly force actions and a recent armed citizen was exonerated when his Meta glasses recorded the event and confirmed his account.
The FBI has collected stuff about people ever since the days of J. Edgar. A friend of mine once got a visit from FBI agents, decades ago. They quizzed her about her connected to suspected Weather Underground members.
It took quite a long time to sort it all out, but it turned out that she came on their radar because she had made an appointment for a massage, and the location for that was a rented office in a building owned by someone suspected of connections with the WU.
She had no idea, of course, but it was quite disconcerted to get questioned like that.