The attorneys general sent a letter to leadership of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on March 26, warning that federal agencies are exploiting commercial data brokers to obtain detailed information about Americans' movements, associations, political activity, and daily lives—information the government would otherwise need warrants to collect.
"Big Tech has built a massive surveillance economy to track, package and sell deeply detailed information about our movements, purchases, preferences, and relationships. Now, out of control federal agencies are buying this data to evade constitutional protections and track and surveil vast aspects of our private lives," said Attorney General Tong in the letter.
The coalition cited recent examples of federal agencies purchasing billions of airline ticketing records and mobile location data from commercial brokers as evidence of a pattern of warrantless surveillance through massive dataset acquisition. The attorneys general argued that current statutory protections, including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act, are outdated and fail to address modern realities where AI tools can rapidly re-identify pseudonymized datasets and assemble intimate profiles without individuals' knowledge or consent.
The letter comes amid growing bipartisan concern in Congress about federal surveillance practices that have been exposed through media reporting, revealing the government's ability to track individuals' travel patterns, movements, and daily routines through commercially purchased data rather than traditional law enforcement methods requiring judicial oversight.
The attorneys general called for comprehensive reforms including prohibiting federal agencies from purchasing data that would otherwise require warrants, mandating judicial approval before accessing Americans' web browsing activity and location information, preventing intelligence agencies from circumventing domestic surveillance limits through foreign intelligence authorities, and requiring deletion of unlawfully collected data and any algorithms trained using such information.
Joining Connecticut in the coalition are the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, representing a broad geographic and political spectrum united in opposition to warrantless federal surveillance.
The letter represents a significant state-level challenge to federal surveillance practices and could presage legislative action as Congress faces mounting pressure to update privacy laws for the digital age and rein in agency data collection that circumvents traditional Fourth Amendment protections.