skippy the bush kangaroo

Thursday, March 20, 2008

passport to privacy

like father like son.

low-level employees of awol's state department have accessed barack obama's pesonal information about his passport three different times in the last three months. msnbc:

two contract employees of the state department were fired and a third person was disciplined for inappropriately looking at democratic sen. barack obama's passport file.

state department spokesman sean mccormack said the department itself detected the instances of "imprudent curiosity," which occurred separately on jan. 9, feb. 21 and march 14. he would not release the names of those who were fired and disciplined. the three were working in separate offices within the passport system, according to state department officials.

"we believe this was out of imprudent curiosity, so we are taking steps to reassure ourselves that that is, in fact, the case," mccormack said.
there is some concern that the privacy act could have been violated. on the dan abrams show tonite several guests wondered aloud how this could happen without top management at the state department knowing.

and the uk independent points out that sen. obama's file was first breached after he won the iowa caucus.

only today was sen. obama notified of these breaches, as well as sec. of state condaleeza rice.

in our opinion, once is an abberaton, twice is a problem, three times is a pattern.

just ask awol's dad...

the incident immediately stirred memories of a scandal in the 1992 campaign when pages were removed from the passport files of bill clinton, who at the time was running against president george h.w. bush.
sen. obama's campaign has called for a full-fledged investigation, to which we add, "well, duh!"

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posted by skippy at 9:11 PM |

3 Comments:

How's this for a pattern? TPM is highlighting an article in the Post that makes a connection - those dates are...

...the day after the New Hampshire primary, the day of the Democratic debate in Texas and the day the Wright story really hit.

No, no pattern there...
commented by Anonymous protected static, 9:38 PM PDT  
certainly no pattern that seems remotely connected to anything political...
commented by OpenID michael, 10:56 PM PDT  
Sure there should be an investigation but this is mountain out of molehill kind of crap. This kind of thing happens all the time in various kinds of businesses -- individuals with access start looking up famous people or friends, family, neighbors. It happens at the IRS, companies with access to credit records, etc. I recently heard of someone looking up Beyonce Knowles a couple weeks back at a firm I deal with which triggered an investigation. A week or so ago, I recall in the news some people were fired for trying to look into Britney Spears'(?) medical records.

What's amazing is that any of this even saw the light of day. Leave it to the media to blow it all out of proportion.

Can these candidates stop playing victims all the time just to get more BS press time?
commented by Anonymous sean on li, 10:55 AM PDT  

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