The interior security secretary, Kristi Noem, speaks at the headquarters of the Department of Internal Security in January 2025.
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The unprecedented efforts of the Trump administration to bring together the personal data of the Americans are faced with a new legal challenge.
A federal judicial judicial appeal filed on Tuesday supports the actions of the Trump administration which aggregate personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans from various federal agencies have violated federal privacy laws and the American constitution, have put sensitive data at the risk of security violations and could lead to the priority of eligible voters.
The trial maintains that the Ministry of Internal Security, as well as the team of the Government Ministry, “works quickly to create precisely the type of” national databases “that the American people and the congress have always resisted, and the privacy law has been designed to prevent.”
The prosecution was filed before the Washington Federal Court, DC on behalf of the League of Women Voters, of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five American -free American citizens.
“This country has been based on the principle that the government has no company in arbitrarily overlap in our private affairs,” said John Davisson, director of disputes of the electronic information center on privacy, in a press release. “However, this administration trampled on our private life on the largest scale, illegally amazing our sensitive personal information and threatening our darling rights.”
Davisson represents the complainants as well as the lawyers of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Democracy Forward Foundation and Fair Elections Center.
The trial is partially focused on a data system from the Ministry of Internal Security known as the Backup that the Trump Administration has converted in recent months into a citizenship research tool by connecting the data of the Social Security Administration.
Due to these modifications, state and federal agencies can now question the backup using social security numbers. The tool was originally created to provide only information on the population born abroad, but after these changes, it can now produce information on citizens born in the United States.
NPR was the first press organization to report on this change in June.
The trial alleges that the federal government has not taken the measures required by federal laws on privacy when it has made these modifications to be saved, and made it “in secret, without the notice required by law and the comments of the public or the congress, and without assessing the implications or the risks of confidentiality error posed by the reuse of data in this way”.
Earlier this month, NPR reported that a certain number of states led by the Republicans had started to manage their total state via via SAPs to check the non-citizens, and more than 33 million voters had been directed so far.
The prosecution argues that the use of the revision of the safeguard by the states could poorly label American citizens who are eligible to vote as non-citizens and could lead to their priority or make them objectives of unjustified criminal investigations to vote legally.
The trial also alleges that the federal government has illegally pooled sensitive files from Americans in what is known as a “data lake” hosted by American citizenship and immigration services (USCIS), including social security numbers, biometric data, tax information, salary and employment files, medical and disabled files, among others.
The pursuit calls for the compilation of personal data by the federal government a “bullseye for pirates”.
In recent months, there have been a number of reports on data security problems, because Doge has taken measures to aggregate government data in a new way. In August, the data director of the Social Security Administration, at the time, said that a member of the DOGE had made a live copy of social security files of more than 300 million Americans and had placed it in the private cloud of the agency where it was accessible to other employees and was vulnerable to identity thieves.
The prosecution requests a judge to order the federal government to stop using the new data tools.
The DHS, the Social Security Administration and the Ministry of Justice, as well as their agency chiefs, are appointed defendants in the trial. The Ministry of Justice refused to comment.
