State Department Employees Fired For Imprudent Curiosity About Obama

Two State Department officials were fired recently and one more disciplined for having a look at Barack Obama’s passport and other personal electronic information. All three were contract workers within the State Department, and used their authorized computer network access to look up files. This is in violation of State Department privacy rules. “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.” A State Department spokesman said, “As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity…..we are taking steps to reassure ourselves that that is, in fact, the case” The Obama campaign has responded by saying, “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.” The breach of Obama’s passport was as early as January, and monitoring systems tripped when the records of a high profile person were accessed. “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,” according to State Department spokesperson. The Obama camp has called for a investigation saying, “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.”
Alan Cosgrove