WASHINGTON — Two Marines, one still serving and one who has left the Corps, sued the Defense Department on Monday. Their claim is simple enough. The department sat on their most sensitive personal information, and for months last year and into this one, strangers could get at it.
The case landed in federal court in Washington and seeks class-action status. If a judge agrees, it would cover more than 3 million current and former servicemembers, according to Reuters, which first reported the filing. Damages sought top $5 million.
At the center of it is the Defense Manpower Data Center. The center keeps personnel records for the whole department — troops, civilian workers, contractors, retirees, veterans and family members. Its files run past 60 million records.
The breach itself was disclosed last month. A War Department official told FEDweek that a small number of unauthorized users got into one of the center’s file-sharing systems between October 2025 and July 2026. The files were not encrypted. Names went out. So did Social Security numbers, birth dates, contact information, race, sex and details of the jobs people held in uniform.
The department has said it has no indication the information has been misused, and it is offering a year of credit monitoring and identity-restoration help through a contractor, IDX. The vulnerability was found on July 16 and patched, according to the department’s account of the incident. About 2.76 million living people were affected, along with roughly 294,000 who have died.
None of that has quieted the lawsuit. It accuses the Pentagon of showing “flagrant disregard for the privacy interests of servicemembers and other military-adjacent individuals,” Reuters reported, and says intruders used a flaw in a personnel-records file-sharing system to reach the data.
Reuters said neither the Pentagon nor the plaintiffs’ lawyers answered its requests for comment right away.
Cases like this have cost the government before. There is a precedent, and it was not cheap. After its own breach, the Office of Personnel Management settled a class action for federal employees in 2022. The price, Reuters noted, was $63 million.
The docket names the case Tristyn Edwards et al v. U.S. Department of War. Its number is 1:26-cv-03667, in the District of Columbia’s federal court. Jason Rathod and Nicholas Migliaccio, partners at Migliaccio & Rathod, are the lawyers behind the filing.
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