A new lawsuit brought by more than 100 federal employees today in New York's American Southern District Court claims that the Trump government's decision to give the so-called Department of Efficiency (Doge) of Elon Musk to their sensitive personal data illegally is. The claimants ask the court to take out an order to take out the access from Doge to information from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which acts as the HR ministery of the United States and Huizen Data about federal employees such as their Sofi -numbers, telephone numbers and workforce. Wired previously reported that Musk and people with connections with him had taken over.
“The fulfilled people gave the defendants of Doge and the agents of Doge-van whom for many age of 25 and are until recently employees of Musk's private companies' administrative access to OPM computer systems, without a normal, rigorous National Male undergo, “the complaint claims. The plaintiffs accuse the doge of violating the Privacy Act, a 1974 law that determines how the government can collect, use and store personal information.
Elon Musk, the Doge organization, the Office of Personnel Management, and the acting director Charles Ezell of the OPM are mentioned in the case as defendants. The claimants include more than one hundred individual federal employees from the US government, as well as groups that represent them, including AFT CIO, a coalition of trade unions, the US Federation of Government employees and the Association of Administrative Law judges. The issued represents more than 800,000 federal employees, ranging from employees from the social security administration to border patrol agents.
The claimants are represented by prominent lawyers in the technical industry, including counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, as well as Mark Lemley, an intellectual property and technical lawyer who recently dropped Meta as a client in his controversial AI Copyright court case because because He keeps against what he claims is the embrace of the company of 'Neo-Nazi madness'.
“Doge's illegal access to employee records appears to be the resources with which they try to achieve a number of other illegal purposes. It is how they have received a list of all government employees, for example, to do their illegal buyout offer. It gives them access to information about transgender employees, so that they can discriminate against those employees illegally. And it lays the foundation for the illegal dismissals that we have seen in several departments, “Lemley told Wired.
Eff -lawyer Victoria Noble says that there are increased concerns about the data access of Doge because of the political nature of the Musk project. For example, Noble says, there is a risk that Musk and his Acolites can use OPM data to focus on ideological opponents or “people they see as unfaithfulness.”
“There is a considerable risk that this information can be used to identify employees to essentially end on the basis of incorrect considerations,” said Noble Wired. “There is medical information, there is information about disabilities, there is information about the involvement of people in trade unions.”
The team behind this most recent lawsuit is planning to push even further. “This is only phase one, aimed at getting an order to stop the continuous violation of the law,” says Lemley. The next phase includes submitting a Class Action right case on behalf of federal employees affected.
