State Department employees canned for snooping in Obama's passport records
Two State Department contract employees have been fired for spelunking in Barack Obama's US passport records:
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...Link (Thanks, Larry!)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.
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The appropriate response is the immediate resignation of the Secretary of State, who is clearly incompetent. (Not that this is any surprise given that it is George W. Bush's administration we're talking about.) Failure to learn from and anticipate a repeat of
Aide Says Nothing Was Sinister, Despite Scandal : What's in Passport Files? (which explains how the same thing happened 16 years ago during another incompetent and corrupt Bush administration) indicate that she is unfit for her position. Senator Obama (AND HIS FAMILY) already face unique risks during this campaign; the systemic failure of the State Department to properly secure his personal information is unacceptable. We must have accountability, and in this case, that begins at the top: Condaleeza Rice's obvious negligence is more than enough reason for her to leave her post at once.
what the hell are you talking about??!! I may agree that the entire current administration is a complete FAILURE and should be brought up on war crimes charges, etc... but...
The system they have in place DID work, that is why the manager of the individuals in question was alerted to their access of the files (since Obama is a high profile person) and the people were fired. The only reason this is becoming a bigger issue is because that manager didn't pass the information up to higher levels. Not to mention the fact that passport files contain nothing that is not already obtainable by other LEGAL means. If someone is searching those files for documents that will create fire-storms then they are not intelligent.
Contract employees have access to State Department files?
Contract employees have access to State Department Files?
Palm to face, head to desk: onward, ever onward.
This is a great example of the media overblowing a story. It's a 98% chance that these people are just Obama supporters that where curious. Just because they are contractors doesn't mean they have security clearance to look into these files. That they did it when it wasn't due to some work-related task is the only issue. Should they discipline these people? Yes. Should there be a minor investigation into whether these people are "Terrorists". Uhh maybe. Should I have seen this story 7 times in the last two hours across four different news outlets? No. Funny how I haven't heard about the people dying in Tibet today, but OMGWTFBBQ people looked at Obama's passport? Burn them! BURN THEM!!
When I worked at a Land title company, we had great fun thinking up people and looking at their titles. I looked at John Elway's, The then-Governor of Colorado's, Alice Cooper's, all sorts of people that lived in the area. It was all just curiosity, abeit mildly illegal (I think) and not job related.
What's so interesting about someone's passport info anyway? I just looked at mine, all it really has in there is name, date of birth, place of birth, and place the passport was issued (well... and a funny looking picture too). There's not even an address or phone number, except for the emergency contact person you're supposed to pencil in.
I can see that it might be mildly interesting to look at someone's actual passport to see the cool visa stamps from exotic lands. But just the info used to obtain the passport? Boring.
The Passport Application Form doesn't seem to have much on it that wouldn't be easily knowable through other means.
Fields that might be of significance are SSN, travel plans, email address & full name. I wonder if the over-reaction to this story is driven by the whole middle-name fiasco that keeps popping up.
Am I the only one who saw "cleared contractors" and thought: "Wow, the CoS is branching out into supplying contract labour to government departments now."
It should be noted that the linked story states that John McCain and Hillary Clinton's passports were looked at also. Sounds like nosey contractors rather than some kind of conspiracy.
#8: and isn't it interesting that only Obama's passport being looked at is mentioned in most of the other stories you'll see today? What's up with that?
If someone who did not work for the government accessed these files, would they be charged with a crime? Certainly. So why is it different for these contractors? They accessed private government info without being asked to by the government. Some would call that treason. Some would call it curiosity.
Whatever the case, they broke the law. It's as simple as that. Whether they looked at your files or those of a presidential candidate, what they did is illegal, and no one is even talking about arresting these people. As a result, you can bet it will happen again and keep happening.
When we had celebrity patients in the hospital, back before files were computerized, I used to literally carry the file around with me or sit on it to keep nosy coworkers and doctors taking a peek. The amazing thing is that there were three breaches rather than three thousand. People aren't very respectful of privacy.
On the contractors thing, a little, maybe, clarification.
I have no friends or relatives in the State Department, that I know of, but I do in the US Army Corps of Engineers. Assuming that they, as ginourmous faceless bureaucracies act the same way, I'd bet that most if not all of the contractors are ex-state department employees. (and I freely admit that this may be an erroneous assumption)
In the Corps, starting under Bill Clinton, a lot of people retired early (because of changes (*) brought on by Gen. Joe and Bunny) or were induced to retire early. Sadly, most of the retirees were in areas that were needed. Middle and upper management was left alone, but now the people that knew how to do stuff were gone. So, contractors were brought in for two reasons.
One was to bypass the byzantine hiring and firing processes. Once a person is a federal employee it is exceedingly hard to fire them. I have many such stories to tell, but they're all long and probably fairly boring, so I'll spare you. :) Contractors on the other hand can be fired or let go pretty easily, and even if there is red tape involved you just let the contract expire and don't hire them back. The former employees who are now back to work at the same job they just left (often times the next day after retiring) like this setup two as they can tell their new (old) boss to take a hike and not worry about losing their retirement, and they can work on interesting projects with lots of fun engineering without having to worry about if it will help or hurt their career.
Second, the money to pay contractors comes out of Some Other Fund (also known as Other People's Money), not the regular budget for an office. So an office can Save Money by getting people to retire (and thus gaining a bonus or promotion for the management for saving money and reducing expenses) and yet turn around and hire the same people right back to do the job. And still Save Money by doing it. If you look at it squint eyed enough, anyway.
In reality the newly contracted employees cost about twice what they did before, because they can't just contract to work on their own. They have to go out and get hired by a contracting company that has won the bid to provide contract employees. That company pays the salary of the newly contracted (former) employee. Usually they get a slight raise. And of course that company has to take a cut, and the employees don't want to work for less than they did, so in my experience the contracting companies charge roughly twice what the employee gets. This is chalked up to "overhead." Nice racket. But everybody is happy because it "Saves Money".
A third person was that hiring former employees as contractors meant you hired people with the proper experience and training right away. Need some people with experience in contract negotiations between Zachary and the Air Force? No problem. A new hire would not have the experience. of course, by not hiring "new" people then when everyone retires for good then you end up with no one having any idea how to do anything. And while the contract companies are, in theory, providing education and training to their employees, in reality they are not because they are just hiring employees that are already trained.
So in a few years when they start having to provide new people they'll be untrained ones because that saves them money. I believe that TXU is having issues with this right now as they laid off most of their linemen, who are now contractors, and the new hires are not trained and keep dying because well it's dangerous to work around high voltage stuff. They are losing their institutional memory and this is only a Bad Thing that will get worse. Eventually you'll have no one around who knows the Best way to keep a flat roof from leaking (in all seriousness: build a conventional roof over the existing, leaking, flat roof), or how to deal with the soil at XYZ AFB when the "book" says to do one thing but that does not work and buildings keep collapsing. Why is it a Bad Idea to route water or sewer lines under a wooden floored gym?
So, while I have no idea if the same goes on at State, I would assume that the contractors were former employees. I know of no contract employees in the Corps that were not, at least at any of the four districts that I keep in contact with through friends, former co-workers, and relatives.
* most notably:
1) removing the requirement to be a (licensed) Professional Engineer in order to advance past certain ranks (this is kinda like an accounting firm saying you don't need to be a CPA to get to the upper levels of the company)
2) the removal of hard limits on advancement to Electrical Engineers and Mechanical Engineers (as a general rule (discovered through empirical research) EEs especially, and ME as well, don't make good managers, so the rules were in place to keep them out of certain management positions. There were ways around it, so that EEs and MEs with good people skills could advance in rank, and it was kinda self selecting: good people skills would get you the exception, bad people skills would not)