Federal workers launch a new demand to combat access to Doge data

A new lawsuit filed by more than 100 federal workers today in the District Court of the southern United States of New York alleges that the Trump administration’s decision to give the so -called access department of the Elon Musk government is illegal. The plaintiffs are asking the Court for a court order to cut Doge access to the information of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which functions as the United States Human Resources Department and houses data on federal workers such as their Social Security numbers, telephone. Numbers and personnel files. Wired previously reported that Musk and people with connections with him had taken care of OPM.

“The defendants of OPM gave the defendants of Lege and the agents of Doge, many of whom are less than 25 years old and until recently the employees of the private companies of Musk,” administrative “access to the systems OPM computer scientists, without undergoing any national and rigorous security that reviews national security. ” The plaintiffs accuse Dux of violating the Privacy Law, 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 interim director of the OPM, Charles Ezell, are appointed as defendants in the case. The plaintiffs include more than one hundred federal individual workers from the entire government of the United States, as well as groups that represent them, including AFL-CIO, a coalition of unions, the American Federation of Government employees and the Association of Judges of Administrative Law . The EGE represents more than 800,000 federal workers ranging from employees of the Social Security Administration to Border Patrol agents.

The plaintiffs are represented by leading lawyers from the technology industry, including electronic lawyers Frontier Foundation, a group of digital rights, as well as Mark Lemley, an intellectual property lawyer and technology that recently retired to the goal as a client in His contentious demand for the copyright of AI because he obtained to what he alleges is the hug of the company of “neo -Nazi madness”.

“Iloge access to employee records turns out to be the means by which they are trying to achieve other illegal purposes. It is how they obtained a list of all government employees to make their illegal purchase offer, for example. It gives access to information about transgender employees so that they can illegally discriminate against those employees. And feel the foundations for the illegal layoffs we have seen in multiple departments, ”Lemley told Wired.

EFF Victoria Noble lawyer says there are greater concerns about access to Doge data due to the political nature of the Musk project. For example, says noble, there is a risk that Musk and his acolytes can use OPM data to attack ideological opponents or “people who see as unfair.”

“There is a significant risk that this information can be used to identify employees who essentially end up based on inappropriate considerations,” Noble to Wired told. “There is medical information, there is information about disability, there is information on the participation of people with unions.”

The team behind this most recent demand plans to boost even more. “This is only phase one, focused on obtaining a court order to stop the continuous violation of the law,” says Lemley. The following phase will include collective claim on behalf of the impacted federal workers.