A Federal Court of Appeals says it will not lift Access restrictions That the Efficient Efficiency Department of Elon Musk has to social security systems that contain personal data on millions of Americans.
The full panel of judges in the 4th Court of Appeals of the United States Circuit voted 9-6 to maintain the ruling of the United States District Judge, Ellen Hollander, while Doge advances with an appeal. The appeal decision was launched on Wednesday.
Earl this month, Hollander issued a preliminary court order The casewhich was brought by a group of unions and retirees who claim that recent actions of Doge violate privacy laws and present massive information security risks.
Hollander said that Dege’s employees could access data that have been written or stripped of anything identifiable personally, but only if they undergo training and background verifications. He also said that Dege and his employees must purge any of the non -anonymized Social Security data that they have already obtained, and forbade them to make any change in the computer code used by the Social Security Administration.
The lawyers who represent Doge had argued that the anonymity of the data would be too onerous and interrupt the efforts of the Trump administration to eliminate any social security fraud.
Appeal judge Robert B. King, writing for the majority, said that Dege wants “immediate and without restrictions” to all social security records, including “the highly sensitive personal information of essentially all in our country”, such as the records of the family court and school, mental health and medical records of the disability recipients of the SSA and bank information and income.
“All this highly sensitive information has been delivered for a long time to the SSA by the American people with all the reasons to believe that the information would be fiercely protected,” King wrote.
Appeal judge Julius Richardson, who voted against the majority ruling, said the case should have been handled by a group of three smaller judges instead of the full panel of active appeal judges. He also said that the plaintiffs have not shown Dege that he has really husted in any of his personal information, but instead they are distressed by the possibility of “abstract damage.”
