Breaking as I type this OP is news that Obama’s passport file at the State Department was breached three times in the last three months, January 9, February 21, and March 14. The people in the first two were contractors that have been fired. The Obama campaign has indicated that they basically just learned about this today. Is this a big deal or a two-day (at most) scandal? I think it’d depend on whether it was politically motivated or just three guys stupidly looking at a personal file for kicks. But what really hurts the State Department in this is the apparent gap of more than two months before even Obama was informed of the breach.
This, too, shall pass. It sounds right now like these were curious people.
If you worked in a position where you could see… would you not be tempted at least?
If the administration is lying… THAT will be the story, not just this. Obama might whip it up some and it certainly serves his purposes…
I do think his response sounded just a BIT like tilting at windmills… unless he knows something we don’t.
I think heads should roll at the State Dept., but I’d think that if it was Dick Cheney’s passport or Joe Shmo from Tupelo. However, I can’t think of anything that highly confidential in the file. (I’m trying to remember if your SSN is on your passport- if so that’d be the most damaging thing).
Well, I think the thing is that it is potentially using government apparatus and security clearances to find out things about his life. It’s not his passport, it’s his passport records. What does this mean? I am not sure, but it seems that it’s a bigger deal than obtaining a copy of his passport.
What is it for Obama? Well, it’s at the very least a MAJOR distraction from what has been ailing him. If there’s any wrongdoing, then he can trump the charges up and use it to paint Bush and McCain as criminally wrong.
Now, it could indeed just be some curious people. But there was a pattern by three seperate people. It wasn’t a one-off thing. The good thing about it for Barack Obama is that he’s gotten lucky. He got his word out on the Jeremiah Wright thing, and did as good a job as he could have done. So now we have this which will surely get rid of the “IS IT ENOUGH?” screams at Faux News along with the constant repetition of the quotes from him which started all of this in the first place.
According to this story, the breaches triggered a system that monitors the files of “high-profile” individuals, so I guess we wouldn’t know if it had been Joe Shmo from Tupelo. Interestingly, a similar thing happened to Bill Clinton’s files when he was running against the elder Bush.
Picked this up off of DailyKos…
They go on to later mention that it is questionable if he’s ever been to Europe for more than just a short stop-over. It goes on to suggest that he release his passport records in order to clear the matter up.
Don’t know if it’s important but there it is…
Does the EU have a spy agency ?
Hypothetical
No, the point was that it could possibly be linked to Hillary, or maybe McCain for the general in a way to play gotcha-politics. Whoever was planning or thinking this was either inspired or planted the story. I’m just posting it because it mentions that Obama should release his passport records because of these charges.
The real problem is whether or not the required investigation(s) will occur, as required by administrative rule and/or federal law. After all, if the passport records of a current United States Senator cannot be kept confidential, what hope is there for anyone else.
There’s basically two possibilities. It appears that all three of the incidents were by three separate individuals, all of these individuals were contract employees working for the State Department–not employees of the State Department.
(Two were described as lower-level contractors and one was described as a higher level contractor with no management responsibilities.)
One possibility is someone from one of the other Presidential campaigns paid one of these people to look into the files.
The other possibility is these people just looked at the passport files on a lark.
I have no idea which it is–but I will guess that it’d be pretty easy to catch if it was a scheme by one of the other campaigns. The State Department already knows who these people are, an investigation can probably look into their financial records and any “unusual” payments would come up–from there they’d have to find out who made those payments.
Personally if they were paid to do this as some sort of effort to get Obama’s travel information to use against him, I wonder why it was done three times.
I imagine these are IT workers who as a necessity of doing their jobs had to have access to some confidential files (they obviously abused that trust), so it should only take once to get all the information needed. Just making assumptions based on what I know about databases, there’s not many scenarios I can imagine for needing multiple looks at the same file unless you were interrupted while accessing it.
It’s been pointed out before that this committee is largely ceremonial and goes a long, long time between meetings. European affairs are handled by a larger, more important committee.
From the Chicago Tribune:
I think I’d be inclined to believe it was people just looking because they could. I’m going to asuume that it was just an ille advised expression of human nature unless and until any evidence surfaces to indicate the involvement of either campaign. I’m sure the Clintons would have had to know that peeking would set off alarms. So would McCain, probably.
If there was any bribery, I would actually suspect someone the media before I’d suspect rival campaigns. If exyernal entities were involved , it was probably some douchebag tabloid or website.
Until another memo pops up saying “HRC wants this”, I think we can assume it is just employees letting their curiosity get the better of them.
Regards,
Shodan
Even though HRC would be no better placed than you or I (well, no better placed than any other Democratic U.S. senator, at any rate) to access Obama’s passport files, I just knew the Freepers would find some way to put this on her!
Surely not even Condi is incompetent enough to allow dem moles to run ops in her department?
If not simply curiosity times 3, Occam comes down on the side of Republican chicanery. Not that there’s any precedent for that. 
In eight years surely the Clintons got to know some career civil servants in all federal departments. I don’t think it’s inconceivable that they got one of them to tell them who the contractors were and the Clintons could have been behind it. I think there’s a 10% chance of that, 90% that it’s just people snooping for fun.
People snooping for fun is looking at where Tom Cruise Vacations, snooping for a presidential candidate [front runner no less] smells of political nastiness. Or US Magazine 
So, no chance whatsoever that Republicans are looking to use confidential information for political gain?
That seems a trifle naive.
Not necessarily. After all, how many of us in GD post in political threads for fun? Right now, Barack Obama is much more interesting to me than Tom Cruise.
By the way, according to the coworkers behind me, not only was Obama’s file looked into, but so were Clinton’s and McCain’s. Can anyone give me a cite for this?
My money’s on idle curiousity.