All posts tagged: misused

DOGE May Have Misused Social Security Data, DOJ Admits

DOGE May Have Misused Social Security Data, DOJ Admits

Law enforcement authorities in the United States have for years circumvented the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment by purchasing data on US residents that would otherwise need to be obtained by a warrant. Today, Immigration and Customs Enforcement apparently thinks it can ignore long-standing constitutional protection by warrantlessly breaking down doors to arrest people, according to a recent whistleblower complaint—despite recent federal rulings that doing so violates the Fourth Amendment. Such is the news coming out of Minneapolis this week, where protesters and the federal government continued their standoff—even as ICE plans to build out a deportation network spanning Minnesota and four other states. And despite the Department of Homeland Security’s claims that merely naming an ICE agent publicly is akin to “doxing,” a WIRED review of LinkedIn found that agents are frequently doxing themselves. Of course, having access to someone’s personal information can have consequences: A report this week found that people are less likely to seek medical care due to ad-tech surveillance and ICE enforcement activities. Immigration authorities aren’t just raiding people’s homes without …

Trump administration admits DOGE may have misused Americans’ Social Security data

Trump administration admits DOGE may have misused Americans’ Social Security data

Two members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency may have accessed and shared Social Security numbers in an effort to help an advocacy group “overturn election results in certain States” last year, according to court documents.  The revelation, which was first reported by Politico, comes as part of a series of corrections to previous testimony by top Social Security Administration officials related to legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data.  Neither the two DOGE members, nor the advocacy group, are named in the court documents. In March 2025, a political advocacy group contacted two members of the DOGE team at the Social Security Administration (SSA) “with a request to analyze state voter rolls that the advocacy group had acquired,” Elizabeth Shapiro, a Justice Department official, wrote in the court documents.  “The advocacy group’s stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States,” said Shapiro. Shapiro wrote that after these communications, one of the DOGE members, as an SSA employee, signed and sent a “Voter …