A federal judge Thursday issued a temporary restraining order barring Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team from having access to personally identifiable information from the Social Security Administration.
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in a scathing ruling accused DOGE
of launching a “fishing expedition” at the Social Security agency and
failing to provide any reason why it needed to access vast swaths of
Americans’ personal and private data. ...
The judge also ordered the DOGE team members and affiliates to delete all non-anonymized personally identifiable information in their possession or control that they have accessed “directly or indirectly” since Jan. 20. ...
Hollander, noting the affiliates of DOGE have kept their identities hidden, wrote, “ironically, the identity of these DOGE affiliates has been concealed because defendants are concerned that the disclosure of even their names would expose them to harassment and thus invade their privacy.”
“The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent,” the judge wrote. ...
