SEC bought access to over a billion airline records to track travelers, no warrant required

Why the hell is the SEC doing this?

Guess I’ll read the whole article to find out.

The report is especially surprising because the SEC is a civil financial regulator tasked with investigating insider trading, securities fraud, and market manipulation. It's not an intelligence or counterterrorism agency

So…?

How is this not unlawful search?

I understand that because the use of and purchase/sharing of this kind of data (which for the purposes of my arguments includes any data broker data, including the data from Flock license plate readers) is not considered illegal due to a lack of consumer protection laws. But how is the government acquiring and using this data not considered a subversion of due process?

“The records contained passengers' names, credit card numbers used to buy tickets, departure and arrival cities, flight dates and numbers, and the agency responsible for the sale.“

And it includes flights that are totally outside the US.

A good reason to not use your primary credit card as who knows who has access to this data. A debit card linked to a burner savings account is probably best.

Every single law enforcement agency does this and far worse. The FBI atf NYPD (even if you've never been to that time zone) and postal inspector service all have your analytics page from pornhub.

But it's suddenly a problem when the FTC starts doing it.