DOJ Failed to Include the White House, Nuclear Laboratories, CIA Facilities and Other Sensitive Locations in List of Places Banned from Data Sales to Russia, Iran, China and other Rival Countries; Senators Call on Trump Admin to Crack Down on Dangerous Location Data Sales
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Senator Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., called for the Justice Department and Director of National Intelligence to address a major threat to Americans’ national security and crack down on the sale of phone location data from the most important U.S. government facilities to hostile foreign nations.
A 2024 executive order required the Department of Justice (DOJ) to regulate the sale of sensitive data, including cell phone location data, from U.S. government employees to Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. The Justice Department banned the sale of any location data of federal government employees to foreign adversaries and identified a list of 736 U.S. government locations subject to a total location data sale ban. But while the DOJ protected hundreds of military bases around the country and 70,000 square miles of Florida, the department failed to include scores of obvious intelligence targets, including the White House, CIA headquarters, Congress, the Supreme Court and nuclear weapons laboratories.
DOJ’s list of protected locations does include the Vice President’s home at the Naval Observatory and Ft. McNair, where Secretary of State Rubio, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and White House senior advisor Stephen Miller all reportedly live in government housing.
“Given the serious national security threat posed by the ongoing sale of data to foreign adversaries from sensitive U.S. government facilities, we urge DOJ and the DNI to promptly act to address these problems. DOJ should replace the incomplete list of sensitive U.S. government-related locations in and around Washington, D.C., with a protection zone covering the entire National Capital Region, “ the members wrote. “DOJ should also work with the DNI to expand the list of countries of concern to include those that conduct surveillance against Americans, U.S. businesses or the U.S. government or are otherwise likely to exploit sensitive personal data in ways harmful to U.S. national security. “
The regulations containing the list of sensitive locations were finalized on December 26, 2024, and published in the Federal Register on January 8, 2025, two weeks before the end of the Biden Administration. DOJ has not updated the initial list of protected locations since.
As the executive order makes clear, the combination of AI and massive location datasets pose a serious threat to national security.
“Countries of concern can use AI to target United States persons for espionage or blackmail by, for example, recognizing patterns across multiple unrelated datasets to identify potential individuals whose links to the Federal Government would be otherwise obscured in a single dataset,” the order stated.
The full letter to the Acting Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence is here.
A web version of this release is here.
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