A lawsuit tries to block the Trump administration’s efforts to merge personal data
The Trump administration’s unprecedented efforts to aggregate the personal data of Americans is facing a new legal challenge.
A class action federal lawsuit filed Tuesday argues the Trump administration’s actions that aggregated personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans from various federal agencies violated federal privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution, put sensitive data at risk of security breaches, and could lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters.
The suit argues that the Department of Homeland Security, along with the Department of Government Efficiency team, is “working rapidly to create precisely the type of ‘national data banks’ the American people and Congress have consistently resisted, and the Privacy Act was designed to prevent.”
The suit was filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on behalf of the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed U.S. citizens.
“This country was founded on the principle that government has no business arbitrarily intruding in our private affairs,” said John Davisson, director of litigation for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in a statement. “Yet this administration is trampling on our privacy at the grandest scale, illegally hoarding our sensitive personal information and threatening our most cherished rights.”
Davisson is representing plaintiffs along with lawyers from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Democracy Forward Foundation and Fair Elections Center.
The lawsuit focuses in part on a Department of Homeland Security data system known as SAVE that the Trump administration converted in recent months into a citizenship lookup tool by linking data from the Social Security Administration.
Due to these changes, state and federal agencies can now query SAVE using Social Security numbers. The tool was originally created to only provide information on the foreign-born population, but after these changes, it can now produce information about U.S.-born citizens.
NPR was the first news organization to report on that change in June.
The lawsuit alleges that the federal government failed to take steps required by federal privacy laws when it made these changes to SAVE, and did so “in secret, without the notice required by law and comment from the public or Congress, and without assessing the privacy implications or risks of error posed by repurposing the data in this way.”
Earlier this month, NPR reported that a number of Republican-led states had started to run their entire state voter rolls through SAVE to check for noncitizens, and more than 33 million voters had been run through so far.
The suit argues that use of the overhauled SAVE by states could mislabel U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote as noncitizens and could lead to their disenfranchisement or make them targets of wrongful criminal investigations for lawfully voting.
The lawsuit also alleges that the federal government unlawfully pooled Americans’ sensitive records into what is known as a “data lake” housed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), including Social Security numbers, biometric data, tax information, wage and employment records, medical and disability records, among others.
The suit calls the federal government’s compilation of personal data a “bullseye for hackers.”
In recent months there have been a number of reports about data security issues as DOGE has taken steps to aggregate government data in novel ways. In August, the Social Security Administration chief data officer at the time reported that a DOGE member had made a live copy of the Social Security records of over 300 million Americans and put it in the agency’s private cloud where it was accessible to other employees and was vulnerable to identity thieves.
The suit is asking a judge to order the federal government to stop using the new data tools.
DHS, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Justice, along with their agency heads, are named defendants in the lawsuit. The Justice Department declined to comment.
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