Hi Digital Rights Supporter,
In a victory for personal privacy, a New York federal district court judge today has ruled that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) violated the federal Privacy Act by illegally disclosing personal data from tens of millions of Americans to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its agents.
Judge Denise L. Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of NY found that OPM violated the Privacy Act and bypassed its established cybersecurity practices. The judge will decide the scope of the injunction later this week.
The court wrote: “The plaintiffs have an interest in avoiding the 'Big Brother' government monitoring that the Privacy Act is designed to prevent.”
How It Started
EFF and a coalition of privacy defenders filed the lawsuit in February asking the court to block Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing the private data stored by OPM, and to delete any data that had been collected or removed thus far. The lawsuit also asked the court to block OPM from further sharing data with DOGE. This massive trove of information includes private demographic data and work histories of essentially all current and former federal employees and contractors as well as federal job applicants.
Our case is fairly simple: OPM’s data is extraordinarily sensitive, OPM gave it to DOGE, and this violates the Privacy Act of 1974.
OPM’s records are one of the largest, if not the largest, collections of employee data in the U.S. With our co-counsel Lex Lumina, State Democracy Defenders Fund, and Chandra Law Firm, we represent current and former federal employees whose privacy has been violated. The lawsuit’s union plaintiffs are the American Federation of Government Employees AFL-CIO and the Association of Administrative Law Judges, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Judicial Council 1 AFL-CIO.
Learn more on EFF's case page and in today's press release.
For Freedom Online
This is great progress, but the path to complete victory is long. With the support of EFF's members, we’ve advocated for technology users in hundreds of cases to protect your freedom online.
You can help defend privacy and free expression for everyone as an EFF member. People whose privacy and security is at risk have never needed your support more than now, so I hope you’ll join us in the movement for a brighter digital future.
