Tag: warrantless surveillance

Colorado Gun Owners Sue Over New Law Allowing Warrantless Access to Dealer Records

A new Colorado law has raised the hackles of a coalition of gun owners in the state, leading them to challenge its constitutionality in federal court.

Signed into law on June 2 by Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, the Requirements for Firearms Dealers Act requires all gun sellers in the state to allow any “duly authorized peace officer” to inspect their sales records “at all times.”

The bill follows in the footsteps of 11 other states and Washington, D.C., by extending the state’s record-keeping requirements for firearms dealers to all retail transactions, including transfers. Dealers will be required to note the customer’s name, age, and address, as well as the firearm’s serial number, letters, make, and caliber. Failure to comply could result in a fine of up to $75,000, the loss of a dealer’s license, and up to a year in jail. 

Gun owners in the state are pushing back against this overreach. Ten days after Polis signed the bill into law, three firearms dealers and two firearms associations filed a joint civil suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, arguing that the bill is a “warrantless-inspection scheme for firearms dealers” that violates the Fourth Amendment because it includes no stipulations for warrants or probable cause and no restrictions on time or frequency.

Colorado’s law would make it easier for law enforcement to engage in fishing expeditions. Under the law, a Colorado police officer could presumably demand that a dealer provide records of firearms sales for the last month, with no mention of a crime being committed or a suspect in mind. While the bill does prohibit law enforcement from creating or maintaining a firearms registry, that provision seems moot if firearms dealers are themselves forced to maintain the registry for cops. 

While the court challenge is ongoing, it’s difficult to see how Colorado’s law complies with the Supreme Court’s precedents on warrantless searches. 

In New York v. Burger (1987), the Court ruled that a warrantless search of a “closely regulated” industry violates the Fourth Amendment unless it satisfies three criteria: the state must have a substantial interest in regulating the industry; the warrantless inspections must directly serve that interest, be necessary for the regulatory scheme; and the statute must offer a constitutionally adequate warrant substitute, such as notification and limits on “time, place, and scope,” to “impose appropriate restraints” on an officer’s discretion. 

Colorado’s law might satisfy the first criterion. But it appears to fall short of the other two entirely, especially since the law is broad enough to allow sheriffs and campus security alike to inspect the records of any firearms dealer in the state.

Even when the law permits the government to inspect a business without a warrant—an administrative search—the Supreme Court ruled in Los Angeles v. Patel (2015) that the subject must be afforded a review by a “neutral decisionmaker” for the search to be constitutional. Colorado law does not provide firearms dealers with an opportunity for such a review before inspection.

Aside from the record-keeping provisions, the bill adds new administrative burdens for firearms dealers by requiring businesses in the state to provide the Department of Revenue with a “comprehensive security plan.” It also tasks the department with adopting rules on acceptable security measures that dealers must comply with. Those requirements will go into effect in October 2027.

State Sen. Cathy Kipp (D–Fort Collins), a cosponsor of the bill, told Complete Colorado the new law “builds on a new bureaucracy established in 2024” to stop “preventable shooting deaths” and reduce gun violence. But another outcome is far more likely: treating gun owners and firearm dealers like de facto criminals.

Colorado lawmakers have created an environment ripe for confrontation between law enforcement and legally armed Americans, all while violating Coloradans’ right to privacy.

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Gun Shops File Lawsuit Against Colorado’s ‘Warrantless Searches’ and Gun Registry Requirements

A lawsuit brought by firearms dealers in Colorado is challenging a new law which implements “warrantless searches” and requires Federal Firearm License holders (FFLs) to maintain a gun registry.

The Courthouse News Service noted that the plaintiffs in the suit includes “the Centennial Gun Club, five firearms dealers and organizations.”

Defendants are Gov. Jared Polis (D), Attorney General Phil Weiser (D), and Colorado Department of Revenue executive director Heidi Humphreys.

The suit centers on HB26-1126, which Polis signed into law on June 2, 2026. The new law requires an FFL to also have a state firearms permit in order to transfer guns and broadens record-keeping requirements, so as to “apply to all retail transactions.” The record must contain “the name of the person that received the firearm and the recipient’s age and address.” This record-keeping becomes the registry and partial motivator for the current lawsuit.

Under HB26-1126, law enforcement can visit the FFL’s store and check the records and “the dealer shall make the records…available at all times for inspection by a duly authorized peace officer.”

The Courthouse News Service noted that “dealers who refuse to allow their records to be inspected can be charged with a class 2 misdemeanor.”

Moreover, in the lawsuit filed by the Centennial Gun Club and others, plaintiffs claim the searches violate privacy rights: “The Fourth Amendment broadly protects businesses from warrantless searches, including businesses engaged in commerce with customers who exercise no independent constitutional rights.”

Additionally, the lawsuit says: “The regime…injures plaintiffs’ customers, who face the prospect that their lawful firearms purchases will be surveilled without warrant protections, chilling the exercise of constitutionally protected rights.”

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A Requiem for Privacy

When President Donald Trump appointed an obviously unqualified friend, a home builder executive, to be acting director of national intelligence, he inadvertently triggered attention to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The director of national intelligence is the head of the umbrella agency that gathers intelligence from the 17 federal spying agencies and from that data prepares and delivers the president’s daily briefing. Sec. 702, which permits warrantless spying, expires this month.

Trump prefers to receive his briefings directly from the CIA and its foreign colleagues, leaving the DNI as an appendage with little to do. Nevertheless, the DNI employs hundreds of spies and analysts, and most of them have national security clearances that permit them to view the nation’s most closely guarded secrets and to invade anyone’s privacy.

Section 702 of FISA theoretically permits federal agents to spy without warrants or suspicion on foreign persons. In reality, it is used as a fig leaf to spy on Americans.

A few years ago, Department of Justice lawyers persuaded the FISA court secretly to permit the National Security Agency — America’s domestic spies — to spy on Americans with whom foreign persons communicate; even suspicionless Americans whose communications with foreigners are benign; even Americans removed by six degrees from conversations with foreigners.

Before 9/11, no one in law enforcement was permitted access to data obtained outside the restraints imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Those restraints prohibit searches and seizures — in the modern parlance, surveillance and data acquisition — without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, sworn to under oath. And the warrant itself must specifically describe the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Since 9/11, the wall between surveillance and law enforcement has collapsed even though the feds still maintain that the Fourth Amendment only regulates law enforcement and not surveillance. This wild proposition is defied by the plain language of the amendment, which protects all persons from all government, and by the history of the colonists dealing with British government agents executing general warrants issued by a secret court in London.

Those warrants permitted the bearers to arrest whomever they wished, to search wherever they chose and to seize whatever they found. Under the pretext of looking for evidence of crimes, like failing to comply with the Stamp Act, these agents were truly looking for what the king considered subversive, like a draft of the Declaration of Independence.

James Madison and his colleagues who drafted the Fourth Amendment surely knew that history and shared the near universal colonial revulsion at general warrants. Hence the requirements in the amendment for probable cause of crime sworn to before the warrant-issuing judge, and specificity in the warrant itself.

All of this was crafted to outlaw general warrants, and protect all persons in America from warrantless government assaults and invasions of their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

Now, back to FISA. FISA was crafted in reaction to President Richard Nixon’s use of the CIA and FBI for warrantless domestic surveillance purposes. This was spying on Americans — opponents of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s political opponents — which as we all now know came crashing down on Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

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Section 702 Surveillance Reaches Its Friday Deadline. Why “Going Dark” Is a Myth.

The government’s broadest warrantless surveillance power is set to expire Friday after the House refused to keep it running.

Lawmakers voted down a three-week extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on Thursday, 218 to 198, with 19 Republicans joining most Democrats against it and seven Democrats crossing over in support.

Speaker Mike Johnson had fast-tracked the bill under a process that needed a two-thirds majority, so the lopsided count sank it. The House then left town for a scheduled weeklong recess, which removes any path to a quick fix. Congress has already punted twice since the original April deadline.

The reaction from the program’s defenders followed a familiar script. They raised the same alarm at earlier deadlines and the catastrophe never showed up.

When Congress last renewed the authority in 2024, the law slipped past its midnight deadline and lapsed for under an hour before the Senate restored it and the surveillance kept running through the gap.

The warnings are back this week regardless. Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, pressed for renewal ahead of the World Cup and backers keep noting that Section 702 feeds more than half of the president’s daily intelligence briefing.

“Democrats in the Senate are playing political games right now with the lives of Americans,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday. “It’s a very dangerous situation.”

What actually arrives at midnight Friday is legal limbo, not a blackout.

The FISA court signed off on the current collection in March and that order runs until 2027, so the machinery keeps operating on permission it already holds.

The court’s authorization runs for another year and the program continues whether Congress acts or not. The honest word for the risk is uncertainty, the kind that government lawyers and company lawyers argue over, and uncertainty does not sound like an emergency. So the defenders reach for “going dark” instead.

What sunsets at midnight is all of Title VII of the surveillance law, which carries separate powers the government uses to spy on Americans living abroad.

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The Trump Surveillance State

The Fourth Amendment protects all persons from warrantless government searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects. It requires that warrants be supported by probable cause of crime and specifically describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

Last week, for the first time in the modern era, the government argued to the Supreme Court of the United States that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution did not outlaw general warrants. General warrants were issued in the colonial era by a secret court in London. They were not based on probable cause of crime or even on articulable suspicion about a potential defendant. They did not identify a target or state what crime was being investigated.

Rather, general warrants were based on governmental need; a meaningless standard as whatever the government wants it will tell a court it needs. The warrants authorized the bearer of the warrant to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

The stated motivation for the general warrants was the British government’s enforcement of the Stamp Act. That legislation required all colonists to have stamps affixed to all papers, books and newspapers in their possession. The enforcement of the Stamp Act was the government’s fig leaf for spying.

We know that the true reason for the Stamp Act was to conduct surreptitious searches for revolutionary materials. We know this because during the one-year existence of the Stamp Act — 1765 — a group of enterprising students at the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University, calculated that more revenue was spent to enforce the act than was collected by the sale of the stamps.

Historians believe that the use of general warrants for the enforcement of the Stamp Act pushed many colonists into the independence camp 10 years later in 1775. The use of general warrants also motivated James Madison and his colleagues in 1791 to craft the Fourth Amendment whose specificity requirement “particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized” poignantly did away with search where you wish and seize whatever you find.

Until now.

Now, in one week on Capitol Hill, the right to privacy is facing its gravest challenges since pre-colonial days, in Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress will wrestle with Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires in just days, and the court will hear a claim that general warrants are still viable.

Sec. 702 permits warrantless surveillance on Americans by permitting federal agents to use software that allows them to conduct surveillance of all fiber optic means of communication — mobile phones, message texting, emails — based on the lawful communications of some Americans to foreign persons and then their subsequent lawful communications to other Americans. The “other Americans” can include all 340 million of us.

Theoretically, the data gathered from these warrantless searches cannot be used for criminal prosecutions, since even the feds who do this spying have told members of Congress that they recognize the need for search warrants to access the content of the data. There are at least two reasons that no one should believe what the feds have said. The first is the feds lie. In 2023, they accessed the content of the data thousands of times without warrants. The second reason is that Madison and the Fourth Amendment’s ratifiers did not believe the government would restrain itself, hence the specificity requirement.

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House Renews FISA Section 702, Rejects Warrant Requirement

The House voted 235 to 191 on Wednesday to keep Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act running for another three years, declining once more to require federal agents to get a warrant before searching Americans’ communications scooped up under the program.

Around twenty Republican privacy hawks broke with leadership and joined Democrats in opposition, but the bill cleared the chamber with hours to spare before the Thursday midnight expiration.

Section 702, first authorized in 2008, lets intelligence agencies intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals outside the United States without a warrant.

The catch, and the part that has driven nearly two decades of reform fights, is that those intercepts routinely sweep up the texts, calls, and emails of Americans who happen to be in contact with the roughly 350,000 foreign targets surveilled each year. That data sits in a federal database, and the FBI can search it for Americans’ information without going to a judge first.

The reforms attached to the renewal do not change that. They tinker around the edges. Federal agents will need an attorney’s sign-off before targeted reviews of Americans’ data, each query will require written justification submitted to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and misuse can now carry up to five years in prison.

The FBI will also have to file monthly reports to oversight officials defending searches involving Americans.

None of this requires a judge or forces the government to articulate probable cause before reading what an American wrote or said.

A bipartisan bloc has pushed for almost twenty years to require specific court approval before agents can pull up an American’s communications from the 702 trove, arguing that anything less is a Fourth Amendment workaround.

The bill that passed Wednesday explicitly references the Fourth Amendment in its text. It just does not require a warrant to honor it.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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Mike Johnson’s Crusade to Renew Warrantless NSA Spying on Americans Culminates This Week

House Speaker Mike Johnson is on a crusade. He is determined to pass a three-year, reform-free renewal of the notorious FISA law that authorizes the NSA to spy on the communications of American citizens, on U.S. soil, without warrants of any kind.

Immediately prior to the last (unsuccessful) attempt by Johnson to pass a new reform-free renewal of this spying law — just two weeks ago — I wrote about the bizarre and deeply bipartisan history of FISA domestic spying and how the U.S. somehow became a country that authorizes its surveillance state to target American citizens, all without warrants.

I will not recount all of that here, except to note that — like the 2001 Patriot Act — the original law empowering the NSA to spy on Americans without warrants was such a self-evident departure from American tradition that passage was only possible by portraying it as a mere temporary emergency measure. Yet those spying powers have now become one of the many such “temporary” and “emergency” measures that have seamlessly become a quasi-permanent fixture of the U.S. government. This upcoming week in the House will determine whether it becomes genuinely permanent and, worse, forever immune to reforms.

The FISA bill that permits warrantless NSA spying on American citizens was first enacted by Nancy Pelosi’s House in 2008, then signed into law by President Bush. The law provided for those powers to expire four years later, unless Congress approved renewal.

The law was first renewed in 2012 with the support of the Obama White House, this time for five years, without any reforms. When that five-year renewal was set to expire in 2018, Congress, this time backed by the Trump White House, passed a six-year reform-free renewal, requiring a new vote in 2024.

For the 2018 renewal, there was a mountain of evidence demonstrating abuse, which in turn gave rise to steadfast opposition to such a renewal from dozens of members of both parties (who were demanding, among other reforms, the addition of a warrant requirement for spying on Americans). As a result, then-Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was forced to rely on dozens of Democratic representatives to secure FISA renewal.

Ryan accomplished this by working in close tandem with three key California Democrats: then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, ranking Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell (D-CA). That liberal trio led 65 House Democrats alongside 191 Republicans to vote to endow a President they were calling a Hitler-type fascist with virtually unlimited power to spy on Americans without warrants.

The last time the FISA bill was renewed was four years after that 2018 vote: in April, 2024, with the support of the Biden White House and the key support of newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson. That time, Congress was only willing to extend it only for two years, meaning the bill was scheduled to lapse on April 17, 2026, unless it was renewed again.

That is why Mike Johnson is now tasked with securing a new multi-year renewal of FISA with no reforms. On April 17 — last week — Johnson’s first attempt to renew the spying law for 18 more months failed to secure the necessary votes in the House for renewal He was thus forced to desperately plead with the chamber for a short 10-day extension to give more time to pressure the 20 House GOP holdouts to change their minds, and to try to induce more Democratic defections.

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The Surveillance Accountability Act Demands Warrants for Data

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) have introduced the Surveillance Accountability Act, a bill that feels like someone took the Fourth Amendment and actually meant it.

The legislation aims “to ensure that all searches that significantly impinge on the privacy or security of a person require a warrant based on probable cause” and to create “a right of action for violations of Fourth Amendment rights.” That covers the kinds of searches federal agencies currently conduct without judicial oversight: pulling your financial records from banks, requesting your browsing history from ISPs, buying your location data from brokers, and harvesting your biometric information from surveillance cameras.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The bill lands in the middle of a brutal Congressional fight over FISA Section 702, the surveillance authority that currently lets the FBI search Americans’ communications.

The new legislation goes much further than the various reform bills circulating around that debate. Where the SAFE Act and the Government Surveillance Reform Act target specific loopholes in FISA, the Surveillance Accountability Act tries to close all of them at once by rewriting the baseline rule: if the government wants your data, it needs a judge’s permission.

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FBI Resumes Buying Americans’ Location Data Without Warrants

The FBI is buying Americans’ location data again. Director Kash Patel confirmed it to lawmakers on Wednesday, confirming what we already knew: that it has resumed purchasing commercial surveillance data, including detailed location histories, from data brokers.

The brokers feeding that data pipeline source much of it from phone apps and games that people use daily without realizing they’re being tracked.

By the time a precise location record reaches a federal agency, it may have originated from a weather app or a mobile game, passed through an advertising middleman, and been packaged for resale, with the person who generated it never consulted or notified.

Senator Ron Wyden asked Patel directly whether the FBI would commit to not buying Americans’ location data without a warrant. Patel declined. The agency “uses all tools…to do our mission,” he told the committee.

He followed up by confirming that “we do purchase commercially available information that is consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act,” adding that it “has led to some valuable intelligence for us.”

Wyden called that arrangement exactly what it is: the government buying what it cannot legally seize. Purchasing information on Americans without a warrant is “an outrageous end-run around the Fourth Amendment,” he said, referring to the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

The workaround is not unique to the FBI. Federal agencies are generally required to convince a judge that probable cause exists before demanding private records from a tech or phone company.

The commercial data market offers a way around that requirement entirely. Agencies simply purchase what they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain, creating a market for data grabbing and exploiting a legal gap that courts have not yet addressed.

Wyden and other lawmakers introduced the Government Surveillance Reform Act last week, which would require a court-authorized warrant before any federal agency can purchase Americans’ data from brokers. The bill is bipartisan and bicameral. Without it, the gap that lets agencies buy their way around the Fourth Amendment remains open.

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Germany’s “Transparency Act” Lets Regulators Search Media Offices and Platforms Without Warrants

The German government has discovered a clever way to expand its surveillance powers: call it “transparency.” The federal cabinet has approved a bill that would let state agents enter media offices and digital platforms without needing a judge’s permission.

The official justification, ensuring honesty in political advertising, sounds harmless enough until you read the fine print and realize it’s about as transparent as a brick wall.

The “Political Advertising Transparency Act” is described as an effort to align with new EU rules on political ad disclosure.

What it actually does is grant the Bundesnetzagentur, a telecom regulator, search powers usually reserved for criminal investigators.

If the agency suspects a company has failed to file the right paperwork, it could send its people to “inspect” offices without a court order, provided they claim there’s an “imminent danger.”

“Imminent danger” is one of those magic bureaucratic phrases that can mean anything from “credible bomb threat” to “somebody forgot to upload a PDF.”

Once that phrase appears in law, the limits become a matter of interpretation.

Legal experts have warned that the law tramples Germany’s Basic Law, which guarantees the inviolability of the home. For journalists, the stakes are higher.

Confidential sources, ongoing investigations, and protected data could all be exposed to inspection because a regulator feels “concerned” about compliance.

In plain language: this opens the door to state intrusion under the banner of good governance.

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