department

As I thought about this last night, it was hard to imagine that this only happened to Barack Obama. Now, we know that it happened to Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama. The State Department’s press conference was less than reassuring. The fact that a trainee could access a Senator’s passport information is somewhat frightening. The fact that safeguards still haven’t been put in place is retarded.

Trainees should have access to fake files or files from American citizens who have volunteered to have trainees learn with their information.

One has to wonder how many of these violations there are per year. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that there were a “handful” out of 18 million passports processed by the Department last year alone. Poppycock. My guess that there are thousands of breaches of every day Americans while there may be only a handful of high profile breaches which are noticed and dealt with by the Department.

I think that it is clear that the State Department has placed a low priority on passport security. It isn’t that they don’t care. They just will get to passport security when there isn’t a crisis somewhere in the world. To her credit Secretary of State Condi Rice has called all three senators and apologized for allowing inexperienced contract workers to access their files.

TCR has more.