Jim Jordan opens new inquiry into FBI using surveillance tools on Jan. 6

A House subcommittee on Thursday announced the launch of a new inquiry over the FBI’s use of surveillance data in connection with the agency’s Jan. 6 investigation.

The House Judiciary’s Selection Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland said the inquiry will include a review of the FBI’s use of “geofence” warrants. Jim Jordan is chairman of the subcommittee.

Geofence warrants enable third-party providers, typically tech firms such as Google, to turn over the location history of its users in criminal investigations.

“In particular, the Committee is examining the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s purported decision to use geofence warrants as part of its investigation into the events that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, while failing to similarly use geofence warrants to investigate the violence that erupted across the country, including at federal facilities, throughout the spring and summer of 2020.”

“In other words,” the committee’s letter to Garland says, “this tactic allows law enforcement to case a wide net and then, after receiving the unique identifiers and location history data of the device(s) from the third-party provider, reverse engineer the information to narrow the universe of persons of interest.”

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"The use of geofence warrants raises serious Constitutional concerns,” the letter says.

The concerns include imprecise data location that provides just an estimate of a device’s actual location, and that the data is tied to a location rather than a suspect, user, account, or crime.