NBC BREAKING NEWS: Two Fired Due to Obama Passport File Breach (UPDATED)

A big story is now breaking on MSNBC: Democratic Senator Barack Obama’s passport file was accessed and two State Department contract employees have been fired:

See UPDATES below.

Two contract employees of the State Department were fired and a third person was disciplined for accessing passport records of Sen. Barack Obama “without a need to do so,” State Department officials confirmed to NBC News.

The three people who had access to Obama’s passport records were contract employees of the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, NBC News has learned. The unauthorized activity concerning Obama’s passport information 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.”

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman noted on MSNBC that candidate Bill Clinton’s passport file was accessed by the first George Bush administration.

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.

“Each time an employee logs on, he or she acknowledges the records are protected by the privacy act and that they are only available on a need-to-know basis,” the official added.

We’ll have more details later, but this promises to be a big national story for several reasons due to some questions:

–Who accessed the file?
–Was it done out of mere curiosity or at the behest of someone in the government or for political gain?
–According to the discussion on MSNBC, this actually took place a few months ago. Why did it take so long for Obama’s office to be informed?

None of this has emerged yet — and as of this writing it has NOT been confirmed by Fineman, or NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that this was a political act. Look for lots of specific questions from reporters.

UPDATES:

The Washington Times:

The officials, all contract workers, used their authorized computer network access to look up files within the department’s consular affairs section, which processes and stores passport information, and read Mr. Obama’s passport application and other records, in violation of department privacy rules, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

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.

Nonetheless, expect the press to ask a lot of specific questions to Rice and other administrations. Also: this is the kind of story journalists love to report so it will be a story with “legs,” for a while. at least.

One instance of “imprudent curiosity” can inspire an “OK.” Two or three, inspires raised eyebrows.