Two contract employees for the State Department have been fired and a third disciplined for inappropriately looking at the passport file of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, a spokesman said.
Spokesman Sean McCormack said on Thursday 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.
"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.
Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama's presidential campaign, called for a complete investigation.
"This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years. Our government's duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes," Burton said.
"This is a serious matter that merits a complete investigation and we demand to know who looked at Senator Obama's passport file, for what purpose and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach," he said.
McCormack said it was not immediately clear what the contract employees may have seen in the records or what they were looking for. He said he did not know the names of the companies they worked for.
Obama was born in Hawaii and lived in Indonesia for several years as a child before returning to the US. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has traveled to the Middle East, the former Soviet states and Africa, where in 2006 he and his wife, Michelle, publicly took HIV tests in Kenya to encourage people there to do the same.
Obama's father was born in Kenya and the senator still has relatives there.
The department has informed Obama's Senate office of the breach and a personal briefing for the senator's staff was scheduled for yesterday, McCormack said.
Similar breaches involving public officials have happened in the past.
During the 1992 presidential campaign, officials in the administration of former president George Bush searched the State Department files of then-Democratic nominee Bill Clinton. An inspector general's report called the search improper and said it was aimed at finding material that would be damaging to Clinton's campaign.
After a three-year investigation costing US$2.2 million, independent counsel Joseph diGenova concluded in a separate report in 1995 that some of the actions investigated had been "stupid, dumb and partisan" but not criminal.
At the time of the searches, which took place on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, 1992, Republicans were criticizing Clinton for anti-Vietnam War activities when he was a student at Oxford University in 1969. Officials looked into the passport files after rumors sparked freedom of information requests from the news media and a Republican congressman, but later discovered that privacy laws would bar their disclosure, the diGenova report said.
A spokeswoman for Senator Hillary Clinton said of the breach: "It's outrageous and the Bush administration has to get to the bottom of it."
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