Class action lawsuit alleges data consolidation within USCIS is illegal

"They point to changes in USCIS' Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE, which is meant to help governments verify immigration status. Several media reports detail that SAVE is now working as a searchable citizenship data system, with data from the Social Security Administration, following a reworking of the system at DHS alongside the Department of Government Efficiency. Some states are using it to check voter rolls in the name of voter fraud, as USCIS itself has announced."

""These dramatic changes far exceed the SAVE system's limited authorized scope and functionality, which previously did not allow bulk searches or queries of U.S.-born citizens. Nor did it previously pool from SSA data or include any search-by-SSN function," the filing reads. The lawsuit filing also alleges that USCIS has created a data lake that combines sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents across different agencies, including the IRS, SSA and Department of Health and Human Services, "in defiance of multiple laws.""

""This country was founded on the principle that government has no business arbitrarily intruding in our private affairs," John Davisson, EPIC's director of litigation, said 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. The law is clear: no national data bank. Together"

A coalition represented by Democracy Forward, CREW, and the Fair Elections Center asked a court to block efforts to combine government datasets within USCIS systems. USCIS reworked its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) into a searchable citizenship data system that now integrates Social Security Administration data and supports bulk searches and search-by-SSN. Some states have used SAVE to check voter rolls for alleged voter fraud. The lawsuit alleges USCIS created a cross-agency data lake combining sensitive information from the IRS, SSA, and HHS in violation of multiple laws, including the Privacy Act of 1974 and constitutional privacy protections.

Read at Nextgov.com