A Salute To Those Who Resist Weaponizing The Death Master File

      From the Washington Post:

Two days after the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled 6,100 living immigrants as dead, security guards arrived at the office of a well-regarded senior executive in the agency’s Woodlawn, Maryland, headquarters.
Greg Pearre, who oversaw a staff of hundreds of technology experts, had pushed back on the Trump administration’s plan to move the migrants’ names into a Social Security death database, eliminating their ability to legally earn wages and, officials hoped, spurring them to leave the country. In particular, Pearre had clashed with Scott Coulter, the new chief information officer installed by Elon Musk. Pearre told Coulter that the plan was illegal, cruel and risked declaring the wrong people dead, according to three people familiar with the events.
But his objections did not go over well with Trump political appointees. And so on Thursday, the security guards in Pearre’s office told him it was time to leave. …

Staffers at Social Security began raising the alarm about the urgent need to address a flaw in the agency’s deaths database in February, according to a person familiar with the matter and records obtained by The Post.
Anybody granted the appropriate permissions within Social Security could mark someone as dead, employees had realized, without having to prove their demise in any way — for example by referencing medical records or a death certificate. In emails and meetings that rose up the management chain, employees warned that the dataset was vulnerable to manipulation, according to the person and the records.
Employees’ fear was partly that a bad actor who gained access to government credentials could label groups of living individuals as dead to target them for punishment, according to the person and the records. Some of those raising the alarm worried specifically that the Trump administration might try to use the database to go after people the president dislikes, the person said. …

A staff of fewer than a dozen career employees was assigned to work with Musk’s team on the project, according to a senior official who left the agency around that time. Career employees were concerned that they might be facilitating something illegal, asking themselves if they were at risk of going to jail for the work they were doing, the official said. …

One official chose to resign rather than remain involved in what he saw as an illegal attempt to repurpose the agency for immigration enforcement. …

Within Social Security, the general counsel’s office is preparing an opinion that will find the Trump administration’s unprecedented use of the death database a violation of privacy law, according to one person with knowledge of the upcoming declaration. The opinion will take issue with the agency knowingly and falsely declaring that living people are dead, the person said. …