Friday, March 21, 2008

Obama Passport Security Breach

This is pretty messy and quite terrible.

via Huffington Post - News broke Thursday evening that two employees of the State Department had been fired and a third disciplined for accessing passport records of Sen. Barack Obama.

The three individuals who breached Obama's files were contractors hired by the department's Bureau of Consular Affairs. The unauthorized activity first occurred in January. (And most recently as Friday)

The Obama Campaign learned of the breach from a reporter. WOW!

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.

Senior State officials said on a conference call on Thursday evening that they were informed about the breach by a reporter making an inquiry, not from the lower-level department officials who first discovered the breaches.

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