Black Box Report

In a flurry of activity that must come as a completely unfamiliar sensation, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had a lot of apologizing to do today:

Barack Obama was so happy when the news about his passport breach came out yesterday -- that was worth at least 10 Unfair Victim Points for him, about 30 shy of the amount he needs to bury this Jeremiah Wright hoopla. Now, however, it appears that passport breaches are not unique to him, but yet another aspect of the Old Politics: Hillary Clinton and John McCain's passport files have also been breached! The State Department is racist, sexist and ageist.

Which brings up two important questions:

1) What the $%^*$#@! is going on over at State?

and

2) What's really going on here?

Another Watergate? The scheming of would-be plumbers searching for vulnerabilities in the possible Democratic presidential nominee's past?

Or three bored cube rats who were just looking out of "imprudent curiosity?"

When the news broke, some speculated it was the Clintons. Then Clinton's passport file was also found to have been breached - last year. This led to speculation that it was not Democrat-on-Democrat political violence, but the hand of the Bush administration. Then, with the revelation that McCain was also a victim, it became more apparent (although by far from sure) that this was a case of State Department contractors sticking their noses where they clearly did not belong, but not necessarily a Machiavellian scheme.

Although it does have a certain precedent:

If all of this has the ring of familiarity, recall that in 1992 a Republican appointee at State accessed Bill Clinton’s passport records. The reasons vary: Some people claimed at the time that it was an effort to see if the president-to-be had participated in antiwar demonstrations when he was going to school in England. Others said that it was to see whether he had visited Libya, and still others whether he had renounced his American citizenship.

Steven M. Moheban carried out that search in 1992 and resigned. He was an aide to Elizabeth M. Tamposi, the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, who was dismissed by President George H. W. Bush. And all that led to the mechanism that caught the current snoopers, whose names we still don't know:

The State Department seems much more solicitous of the privacy of these fired rule-breakers than the privacy of the president candidate(s) being snooped. State is still refusing to release the names of the snoopers or the contractors they worked for.

To bolster State's claim that this was just a case of "imprudent curiosity," there's not actually anything in your passport file of any use to someone doing some political opposition research, unless you count an unflattering passport photo (mine looks like I've been freshly whacked with a 2x4).

Which is not to say this isn't a big deal. This is no less than 5 separate violations of the Privacy Act. Against presidential candidates, no less. And it took months for those in charge to notify their superiors. That is kind of a big deal:

It is inconceivable that the breach of a private file belonging to a Presidential candidate could happen without an alert going immediately to…the State Department...The protection of Presidential candidates is a fundamental mission for any government, whether Republican or Democrat.

Apparently privacy and security aren't what they used to be at the State Department. Hotline: On Call has a suggestion:

Clearly the folks at State have too much time on their hands. I'd like to introduce them to Scrabulous or Texas Hold 'Em. Give them something else to do rather than violate the privacy rights of high-profile people (and what about the rest of us?) ...

And THIS is why you don't go giving an administration - especially this administration - unfettered access to Americans' private records with little to no oversight:

Incidents like the snooping into Obama's passport file are not the exception, and are not even merely the rule, but are the pervasive and inevitable outcome of allowing government officials to spy on Americans without real oversight.

Because if all three presidential candidates can't keep prying eyes out of their private records, what chance do the rest of us have?