Patrick Eddington: ICE buys its way around the Fourth Amendment

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wants to know where someone works, worships, or travels, it doesn’t need to convince a judge it has probable cause for a warrant. In most cases, it can simply buy the data from commercial data brokers. That giant hole in the Fourth Amendment isn’t some oversight by the federal government bur rather the logical outcome of decades of surveillance battles that Congress has chosen to forfeit.

Immediately after al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States...