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Breaking: Obama’s Passport Records Breached |
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MSNBC has this breaking story:
Two contract employees of the State Department were fired and a third person was disciplined for accessing passport records of Sen. Barack Obama “without a need to do so,” State Department officials confirmed 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, NBC News has learned. The unauthorized activity concerning Obama’s passport information occurred in January.
This is big news. The same thing happened to Clinton in 1992, with big reprocussions in an election year (h/t Crooks and Liars and Attyhood):
State Department officials said Ms. Tamposi and Mr. Moheban were looking for documents that would show whether Mr. Clinton had ever considered renouncing United States citizenship or becoming a citizen of another country to avoid military service in Vietnam. No such information on Mr. Clinton was found.
In this year’s Presidential election, the Bush-Quayle campaign portrayed Mr. Clinton as a draft dodger, criticized him for taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and suggested that a 1969 trip to Moscow by Mr. Clinton raised doubts about his patriotism and his character.
I guess it should come as no surprise that privacy isn’t a priority under the Bush administration. Still, a couple of questions immediately spring to mind. Who were these contractors working for? What right-wing connections does this contracting company have? What records were accessed? What were these workers told to look for?
One can only hope a company like Haliburton or Blackwater gets tied to this. It’s time to expose those companies for what they are.
apart from the bizarreness of this all, from a purely pragmatic point of view I hope that this changes the media’s focus as they swarm onto this story and (I hope) stop mangling the “story” about Reverend Wright. It will be interesting to get some answers to the many questions that have already been raised.
Now this is a real story. Coupled with the photos of the Clintons with Wright…
The Prime Contractor to the State Dept. for this type of data management is Computer Sciences Corp. (www.csc.com).
CSC is the 13th largest government contractor with total federal contract awards exceeding $4.18B (2007).
CSC is heavily integrated in every manor and branch of the US Federal Government. According to the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, CSC has only had 3 confirmed and adjudicated instances if misconduct since 1995, however, there has been a tremendous amount of near recent whistle-blowing and investigations regarding the handling post Katrina data management and crises management implementation.
NEVERTHELESS, with as bad as the contract/subcontracting of goods and services to the government has become in recent years, the employees involved may have very well been second or even third tier subcontractors.
Contrary to Larry Johnson’s (No-Quarter blog) assertion that these files contain relatively “harmless” information and are limited in detail and scope, he’s dead-ignorant-wrong.
The primary document that generates ones’ Passport File is the DS 11. This, of course, contains a wealth of sensitive personal data, but the application process also requires one to further submit documentary evidence as well. SS numbers are cross checked with the IRS and Treasury depts with these results included in the database. In other words, each passport file becomes a fairly deep date file in short course.
Certainly, one’s passport file is not the most revealing or “scoop” producing of sources, but it is nevertheless fairly sensitive.
First reports say the contractors were employees of DynCorp.
You know, the Abu Ghraib guys?
Obama should hire his own attorney to dig into this. Internal investigations ain’t gonna do jack.