**BREAKING**
News broke Thursday evening that two employees of the State Department had been fired and a third disciplined for accessing passport records of Sen. Barack Obama.
The three individuals who breached Obama's files were contractors hired by the department's Bureau of Consular Affairs. The unauthorized activity first occurred in January.
"A monitoring system was tripped when an employee accessed the records of a high-profile individual," a department official told NBC News. "When the monitoring system is tripped, we immediately seek an explanation for the records access. If the explanation is not satisfactory, the supervisor is notified."
Explaining why the contractors had access to the files, the official said: "The State Department uses cleared contractors to design, build and maintain our systems and cleared contract employees provide support to government employees and several steps of passport processing including data entry, file searches, customer service and quality control.
Senior State officials said on a conference call on Thursday evening that they were informed about the breach by a reporter making an inquiry, not from the lower-level department officials who first discovered the breaches.
The senior officials declined to name who was behind the breaches, and said they did not know whether Obama's files were disseminated to other individuals. Legal analysts said that while the breaches themselves may not have been illegal, any distribution of the information would almost certainly be a violation of privacy laws.
"That is one of the things we are obviously investigating," said Patrick F. Kennedy, head of bureau of consular affairs. "I have no reason to believe they did, but I am certainly not going to be dismissive of what is a serious and valid question. On the basis of fast work this afternoon [I don't believe they did]."
The officials also could not say for certain whether the breaches were motivated by political sabotage or some other interest.
"Sketchy facts indicate that there isn't anything more to it then [imprudent curiosity]," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. "But again, I don't want to be dismissive of the possibility that it isn't something more than that."
The dates of the breaches were January 9, February 21, and March 14 -- last Friday. Those correspond, as TPM's Josh Marshall noted, to the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic debate in Texas, and the day the Reverend Jeremiah Wright story became major political news.
How the State Department handled the incidents is as noteworthy as the breaches themselves.
According to McCormick, "Senior management from this department first became aware of this today."
NBC's Howard Fineman reports that "a State Department official called Obama's Senate office to inform him in almost a routine, bureaucratic way that a breach had occurred."
The office of the State Department's inspector general, which typically investigates such matters, was also informed of the breaches today. It was unclear whether a probe had already been launched, and the office does not have authority to compel cooperation from workers who are not employed by the department -- such as the contractors who have already been fired.
Kennedy declined to speculate how the investigation would play out.
"We don't know that [the fired workers] are going to decline to talk to the inspector general," he said. "We have to take this on a quick march but step-by-step basis."
A similar controversy occurred during the 1992 presidential campaign, when a senior State Department official under George H. W. Bush accessed Bill Clinton's passport information and was forced to resign.
The Obama campaign, which will be fully briefed by Kennedy tomorrow, released the following statement in regard to tonight's news.
"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. 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."
More from the Washington Times:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was notified of the security breach yesterday, and responded by saying security measures used to monitor records of high-profile Americans worked properly in detecting the breaches.
Mr. McCormack said the officials did not appear to be seeking information on behalf of any political candidate or party."As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity," Mr. McCormack told The Washington Times. ...
One administration official said the FBI is conducting a preliminary inquiry into the officials involved in the unauthorized access incidents related to Mr. Obama, Illinois Democrat. An FBI spokesman could not be reached for comment. ...
Asked whether a political candidate or party is behind the incidents, Mr. McCormack said: "None at this point in time that we have determined."
Mr. McCormack declined to provide the names of the employees or the contract, but he said they were hired by the contractor involved in producing, processing and approving passports.
