Data brokers sell U.S. military personnel geolocation, health conditions, and financial data for $0.12 per record, and law enforcement agencies purchase location data without warrants to bypass the Fourth Amendment

Data brokers in the United States sell comprehensive personal data on active-duty military members and veterans -- including home addresses, real-time geolocation, net worth, health conditions, religion, and information about their children -- for as little as $0.12 per record, with no verification of buyer identity or intent. Simultaneously, federal agencies including the FBI, IRS, DEA, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security purchase geolocation data from commercial brokers to track Americans' movements without obtaining warrants, court orders, or subpoenas. Why it matters: foreign adversaries can cheaply acquire data to profile, blackmail, and target military personnel and their families, so national security is compromised at scale for the price of a bulk data purchase, so law enforcement agencies use commercial data purchases as a constitutional workaround to conduct warrantless surveillance, so the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search is functionally nullified by the third-party doctrine loophole, so Americans have no practical way to prevent government tracking of their movements because the data exists in commercial databases they cannot access or delete. The structural root cause is that the third-party doctrine -- the legal principle that data voluntarily shared with a company loses Fourth Amendment protection -- creates a constitutional loophole where the government can purchase surveillance capabilities that would otherwise require a warrant, and Congress has failed to pass legislation closing this loophole despite bipartisan recognition of the problem.