Privacy officer resigns as DOJ readies voter data for DHS : NPR

As Justice Department officials are working to acquire sensitive voter registration data from states and have recently disclosed a plan to share it with the Department of Homeland Security, a key privacy officer in DOJ’s division tasked with enforcing civil and voting rights laws has resigned.

Kilian Kagle was the chief FOIA officer and senior component official for privacy for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division before leaving his post in recent days. His resignation has not been previously reported.

For nearly a year, the DOJ has been making unprecedented demands for sensitive voter data from most states – including voters’ driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses – that some say violate privacy law.

In some cases, like in California, the demands went further, to include party affiliation and voting history. The agency has said it needs this data to ensure states are performing voter list maintenance and removing ineligible registrants. DOJ has sued more than two dozen states that have not turned over their voter lists.

The Justice Department’s efforts to acquire this voter data come as the Trump administration is investigating 2020 election results and continues to elevate unfounded conspiracy theories about the prevalence of election fraud, which has been shown to be rare.

Last week, Eric Neff, acting chief of the Justice Department’s voting section, said at a hearing in Rhode Island that his agency’s intent is to share state voter roll data with the Department of Homeland Security and run it through a DHS data system called SAVE to check for noncitizens and deceased individuals on the rolls.

While the DOJ’s cases are still pending in most states, federal judges in California, Oregon and Michigan have so far dismissed the DOJ’s demands for sensitive state voter data, finding that the federal government was not entitled to the records under the law. Under the Constitution, states administer their own elections, and voter data has always belonged to the states.

In the California case, U.S. District Judge David Carter specifically noted in his January ruling that DOJ’s demand violated various federal privacy laws, as well as California state privacy law, a concern that has also been raised by states and privacy experts.

“The Department of Justice has no legal authority to maintain a massive database of state voter records in the first place,” said John Davisson, deputy director and director of enforcement at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit dedicated to privacy rights.

“It’s an unlawful and inexcusable abuse of sensitive voter data, and no amount of artful paperwork can fix that. Still, it’s telling that DOJ hasn’t even gone through the motions yet of publishing basic privacy documentation required by law,” Davisson said.

DOJ hasn’t issued notices or privacy assessments for its data requests

So far, 17 mostly Republican-led states have turned over their voter rolls to the Justice Department, according to the agency. Yet DOJ has not issued any public notices or privacy assessments about this new data collection nor its plans to share the data with DHS.

Federal privacy laws require such documents before a federal agency collects or disseminates personal, identifiable information about the public for a new purpose. The documents are typically issued in collaboration with the agency or division’s designated privacy officer.

Kagle declined NPR’s request to comment but confirmed he had recently resigned. He issued a privacy impact assessment for an unrelated DOJ case management database as recently as March 20.

Neff, the acting chief of the voting section, said at the Rhode Island hearing that DOJ has yet to do anything with the voter data it collected from 17 states because, “there are still a couple steps we have to go through before the United States is comfortable proceeding and comfortable representing to this court that we’re in full compliance with the Privacy Act.”

Still, Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School who also served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and an adviser on voting rights issues for the Biden administration, said it is a problem that DOJ now possesses the data without public notice and transparency about how the data would be used and stored, as is required by the Privacy Act.

Levitt said each of the 17 state voter rolls with sensitive information that have been collected by DOJ so far represent “a criminal violation.”

“I don’t think DOJ has lawfully explained to the public or to Congress basic data management, basic data systems analysis questions about the compilation of new data systems on Americans – as is required by statute,” Levitt said. He also said there are security concerns with how the federal government would store this volume of sensitive information and protect it from a data breach.

In the same Rhode Island hearing, Neff dismissed concerns about hackers accessing the data held by the Civil Rights Division, and told the judge, “We have yet to have a data breach in our history.”

He insisted his agency’s plan to share state voter data with DHS would follow federal privacy law and said DOJ acting Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer Peter Winn was working on that plan.

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy asked Neff during the hearing what DHS would be able to do with the state voter data DOJ plans to share. “So not for ICE going to people’s homes and arresting them; right?” she asked.

When Neff said “No,” McElroy asked if he was sure.

“Good question, your Honor, because the Civil Rights Division cannot promise what any other agency will or will not do,” Neff acknowledged. At a later point in the hearing, he asked to correct the record and said, “This is not being used for immigration purposes.”

But voters flagged by DHS’s SAVE system as potential noncitizens are referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for investigation, according to a statement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson, Matthew Tragesser.

Separately, an executive order that President Trump signed this week to limit mail-in voting tasks DHS with coming up with a list of eligible voters in each state, though many legal experts expect the order will be blocked by federal courts.

Other privacy experts around the government have also left 

Many career employees have left DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during this administration, and Kagle is also part of a growing number of privacy and FOIA experts from around the federal government who have left their posts. Davisson of EPIC called it an “exodus,” citing both cuts and people who chose to leave.

While the reasons for Kagle’s resignation have not been disclosed, the Trump administration’s aggressive and unprecedented quest to aggregate Americans personal data, and make more of it accessible to federal immigration officials, has coincided with some high profile resignations.

Last year, Melanie Krause, the former acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, resigned as that agency entered into a data sharing agreement with ICE that has since been blocked by federal courts. The former chief data officer of the Social Security Administration, Charles Borges, became a whistleblower and resigned out of concern about data practices by Department of Government Efficiency staffers with sensitive Social Security data.

Since Borges’ departure, the agency announced that two former DOGE staffers were referred to a watchdog for possible Hatch Act violations after the agency discovered they communicated with a political advocacy group about matching Social Security numbers with voter roll data in an attempt to find evidence of voter fraud.

Last month, the agency’s inspector general told members of Congress it was reviewing an anonymous complaint with new allegations that a former DOGE employee potentially misused Social Security data.