A lawsuit tries to block the Trump administration's efforts to merge personal data

"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."

A class-action federal lawsuit contends that the Trump administration aggregated personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans from multiple federal agencies, violating federal privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution. Plaintiffs argue the aggregation put sensitive data at risk of security breaches and could disenfranchise eligible voters. The suit alleges the Department of Homeland Security and a Department of Government Efficiency team are creating national data banks that the Privacy Act was intended to prevent. The case was filed on behalf of the League of Women Voters, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and five unnamed citizens. John Davisson of EPIC and lawyers from CREW, Democracy Forward Foundation and Fair Elections Center represent the plaintiffs. The complaint highlights changes to the DHS SAVE system that allow state and federal agencies to query SAVE using Social Security numbers after linking Social Security Administration data, converting SAVE into a citizenship lookup tool.

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