What looks like a case of political irregularity is now becoming a government sponsored privacy debacle that highlights the vulnerability of personal information can be.
The reports began to surface last week that a State Department contractor had violated Senator Barack Obama's passport files. It was later discovered that the same contractor had also consulted the passport file of Senator John Mccain illegally and information that Senator Hillary Clinton had been consulted during a training session at the State Department in summer latest. None of these people were aware of these breaches of their personal information to date.
The Associated Press now reports that more than twenty celebrity passport files were accessed by contractors. Moreover, it seems that new employees and entrepreneurs are invited to access passport files as part of their training regiment.
Passport records contain highly sensitive information, including name, date of birth, address and Social Security numbers, which could be led to many forms of identity theft in the bad hands. The fact that sensitive personal information could thus be systematically mismanaged by a government agency should be a wake up call to us all.
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