PrintMarch 22, 2008
Obama Campaign Link to Passport Snooping
The Washington Times is reporting that authorities are zeroing in on one of the contract employees who viewed both Obama's and McCain's passport records - a man who works for a company headed up by an advisor to the Obama campaign:
Two of the three contract employees had been fired before The Washington Times first reported Thursday on security breaches involving Mr. Obama's passport records.Perhaps Mr. Obama is not so eager now to make this into a campaign issue.
The furor expanded yesterday to incidents involving the passport records of Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton. The third employee, who has not been fired, worked for The Analysis Corporation (TAC), which is headed by John O. Brennan, a former CIA agent who is an adviser to Mr. Obama's presidential campaign on intelligence and foreign policy.
The TAC employee is the only individual to have accessed both Mr. Obama's and Mr. McCain's passport information without proper authorization, a State Department spokesman said.
That employee, who was not named, triggered an electronic alarm system, officials familiar with the probe said. The accessed records have the data provided in passport applications and used by the department to issue or renew travel documents.
It is not likely that these violations of privacy were any more than curiosity or at worst, independent actors looking for information to sell to the press. The ease with which they were discovered and caught proves that point because no professional political campaign could be that inept - that if there was a plot of some sort, we would probably never had heard about it or it would have been discovered by accident.
In this case, the amatuers apparently didn't know that their actions tripped several alarms.
