Bush administration illegally examined Obama passport file

[Joanne98]

In an apparent “dirty tricks” operation against Senator Barack Obama, one of the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates, State Department employees illegally accessed personal data from his electronic passport file.

Although security programs automatically detected the data breaches, which occurred on three separate occasions this year, the Obama campaign was not notified nor was the incident made public until a reporter for the Washington Times contacted the State Department after learning of the incident.

A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said that the three employees, all contractors, had access to files in the consular affairs section, and read both Obama’s passport application and “other records,” in violation of department privacy rules. Their actions also appear to have violated the 1974 Privacy Act.

McCormack denied that the three were acting on behalf of the Republican Party or any other candidate. “As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity,” he told the Washington Times.

Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, claimed that top officials at the State Department only learned of the security breach Thursday afternoon, March 20, when a Times reporter called, although the files were accessed on January 9, February 21 and March 14, and on each occasion a security monitoring program detected the unauthorized data access.

“I will fully acknowledge that this information should have been passed up the line,” he told reporters in a teleconference. He added that two of the three contractors were fired and the third was disciplined and deprived of access privileges, actions taken by supervisors before top officials even learned of the violations.

The firings will make it more difficult to carry out the full-scale investigation now ordered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, since the discharged employees, who worked for an unnamed subcontractor, have no incentive to cooperate or give testimony, and are likely to plead the Fifth Amendment instead.

Kennedy explained that the records of high-profile individuals, including politicians and celebrities, are “flagged” with a computer tag that automatically notifies supervisors when the files are improperly accessed.

“We have a sophisticated computer tracking system that looks at this when it sees anything that’s inappropriate,” he said. “But, I will admit, they failed to pass the information up the chain to a sufficiently high level.”

The illegal accessing of Obama’s personal information is particularly chilling, coming as it does barely a week after the revelation that the FBI conducted extensive surveillance of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, including interception of thousands of e-mails and text-messages. Spitzer resigned after it was made public that he had patronized call girls, but it is clear that he had been targeted for investigation because he was a prominent Democrat, not because the FBI was pursuing a prostitution ring.

These events must be understood in conjunction with the politicized prosecutions by the Justice Department under Bush crony Alberto Gonzales, which led, among other things, to the imprisonment on fabricated charges of former Alabama Democratic governor Don Siegelman and Wisconsin state official Georgia Thompson. The picture emerges of an administration engaged in a massive and systematic abuse of power for political ends.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/pass-m22.shtml

[Uben]

1. They accessed Clintons and McCains, too

All three had their passport files illegally accessed by contract employees.