Where We Left Off
Last week I covered Chatrie v. United States. The short version: the Supreme Court held that geofence warrants are searches under the Fourth Amendment. If the government wants your location data from Google, it needs a warrant and probable cause.
That ruling covers one path to your location data. There is another path. The government does not compel it. The government buys it.
This week gave us a perfect case study.
What Happened
The ATF canceled its contract for Webloc, a commercial location surveillance tool made by a vendor called Penlink.
Webloc does not serve warrants on anyone. It pulls location data from the advertising ecosystem — the apps on your phone that collect your coordinates and sell them into the ad-tech market. Webloc packages that data into a searchable tool. Device IDs. Location coordinates. Hundreds of millions of devices. By some accounts, it can reconstruct a person's movements going back three years. From a protest back to a driveway.
No warrant. No judge. Just a purchase order.
The story broke open in May. At a congressional hearing, Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) pressed ATF Director Robert Cekada about the agency's purchase of geolocation data. Cekada acknowledged the contract and described it as "an ad-tech type thing." He also said the agency had not used it in a criminal case because it had not yet written policies for how to use it.
That turned out to be wrong. After the hearing, Cloud teamed up with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has spent years pushing back on government purchases of broker data, and their offices got a briefing from the agency. The number that came out: more than 340 searches through the system, with more than 220 tied to active ATF case numbers.
There is one more detail worth sitting with. In a suspected arson case at a defense contractor facility, both the prosecutor and the judge expressed serious discomfort with the warrantless ad-tech data. The ATF backed off and got a traditional court order for cell tower data instead. When the tool met an actual courtroom, the agency did not defend it. It retreated.
ATF now calls the whole thing a "pilot," says the tool "does not meet our needs," and says it is not using any other ad-tech-sourced services.
Why This Matters After Chatrie
Put the two stories side by side.
Chatrie says the government needs a warrant to compel location data from a company like Google. The Webloc story shows the workaround: do not compel it. Buy it from a broker who already collected it through the ad market. The Supreme Court has never squarely decided whether that purchase is a search. Carpenter did not answer it. Chatrie did not either.
So the constitutional rule right now looks like this. The warrant path is guarded. The checkout lane is open.
And the checkout lane is busy. ATF stepped back, but the FBI and DHS continue to buy commercial location data. In January, DHS issued a request for information asking industry how advertising data could support its deportation and enforcement mission. FBI Director Kash Patel told the Senate the bureau purchases commercially available information and that it has produced valuable intelligence. Wyden's office says ICE — which holds its own Penlink contract — has stonewalled congressional oversight of its purchases.
One agency canceling one contract under bipartisan pressure is not a policy. It is an exception.
What Would Actually Close This
Two things could shut the loophole. A court could extend Chatrie's logic to purchased data — if compelling the data is a search, buying the same data to avoid the warrant requirement should not launder it. That case has not arrived yet. Or Congress could act. Wyden's answer is the Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would bar agencies from buying data they would otherwise need legal process to obtain.
Until one of those happens, remember what the ATF episode actually proved. The agency ran hundreds of searches with no warrant, no policy, and no public knowledge. It stopped because two lawmakers asked questions, not because any law required it to stop.
Chatrie was a real win. But your location data is protected from a subpoena and available for a subscription. That is the signal this week.
Sources: CyberScoop, Associated Press, Biometric Update, statements from the offices of Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Michael Cloud.