Two Fired for Accessing Obama Passport File
Two contract employees of the State Department were fired and a third person was disciplined for inappropriately accessing the passport file of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, it emerged last night.
According to NBC news the three people who had access to Obama’s passport records were contract employees of the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.
The unauthorized activity concerning Obama’s passport information occurred on three separate occasions on January 9, February 21 and March 14, triggering alarms in each case.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters the officials did not appear to be seeking information on behalf of any political candidate or party.
“We believe this was out of imprudent curiosity, so we are taking steps to reassure ourselves that that is, in fact, the case,” McCormack said.
Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama’s presidential campaign, last night called for an urgent investigation. “This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years. Our government’s duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes,” Burton said.
“This is a serious matter that merits a complete investigation, and we demand to know who looked at Senator Obama’s passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach,” he added.
McCormack said it was not immediately clear what the contract employees may have seen in the records or what they were looking for. He said he did not know the names of the companies they worked for.
The department has informed Obama’s Senate office of the breach, and a personal briefing for the senator’s staff was scheduled for today, McCormack said.
According to the Washington Times, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was notified of the security breach yesterday, and responded by saying security measures used to monitor records of high-profile Americans worked properly in detecting the breaches.
“A monitoring system was tripped when an employee accessed the records of a high-profile individual,” a department official told NBC News. “When the monitoring system is tripped, we immediately seek an explanation for the records access. If the explanation is not satisfactory, the supervisor is notified.”
Explaining why the contractors had access to the files, the official said: “The State Department uses cleared contractors to design, build and maintain our systems and cleared contract employees provide support to government employees and several steps of passport processing including data entry, file searches, customer service and quality control.
“Each time an employee logs on, he or she acknowledges the records are protected by the privacy act and that they are only available on a need-to-know basis,” the official added.
Bill Clinton was the subject of a similar data breach in 1992, when state department officials looked up his records to see if he had attempted to dodge the Vietnam draft in the late 1960s.
By Guardian Unlimited © Copyright Guardian Newspapers 2008
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