By AJ Vicens
The controversial email system used by Elon Musk and his associates to simultaneously contact all federal employees for the first time operates “entirely on government computers” and contrary to news reports does not use a non-government server, officials with the Office of Personnel Management said in a court filing Wednesday.
An attorney representing unnamed OPM employees asked a judge January 27 to issue a temporary restraining order halting the system as it represented a grave security risk to roughly 2 million executive branch and judicial branch employees, along with an unknown number of contractors.
The email system was developed and installed without the required Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), Kelly McClanahan, the executive director of the National Security Counselors public interest law firm, argued in a complaint.
The PIA was not necessary since the system only deals with federal employee data, government lawyers said in a February 5 court filing, which included a PIA dated February 5 which said the system, dubbed the “Government-Wide Email System (GWES),” collects federal employee names, their government email addresses, and “short, voluntary email responses.
The filing comes amid growing concern that Musk and his associates are flouting security protocols when handling personal information and data as they work to cut staff across the U.S. government.
The PIA listed Senior Advisor to the Director Riccardo Biasini as the system’s contact point and was signed by Greg Hogan, the agency’s chief information officer. Biasini is a former engineer at Tesla and most recently a director at The Boring Company, Musk’s tunnel-building operation in Las Vegas.
It’s not clear if the “government computers” are new or were existing OPM infrastructure. An OPM spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions.
McClanahan argued the system contains “vast quantities” of personally identifiable information “which are more susceptible to cyberattacks than the pre-existing OPM systems.”
The suit cited an anonymous Reddit post saying that someone “walked into our building and plugged in an email server to our network” to send the emails. An anonymous OPM staffer told the Musk Watch newsletter Feb. 3 that the server was “a piece of commercial hardware they believed was not obtained through the proper federal procurement process.”
McClanahan did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
(Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
