Passport-Gate

I was curious and checked with Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. It has a definition for “-gate.” It is defined as “political scandal often involving the concealment of wrongdoing.” It seems America leads the world in “gates.” Now we have another one. “Passport-Gate” comes to us courtesy of State Department contract workers who inappropriately accessed the passport files of Barack Obama (and it seems now Hillary Clinton and John McCain). Obama’s campaign released this statement.

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

A full investigation does needs to be conducted. But it seems, despite a great deal shrill rhetoric, that the system of safeguarding privacy actually worked in this case. Occam’s Razor would indicate that the simplest explanation, that some temporary workers abused their access to satisfy curiosity (much as hospital workers peered into the medical records of Brittany Spears and George Clooney), is most likely the case here. That is a problem, but if government employees have legitimate access to private information, there really is no way to prevent them from looking at it. What the system can do is make sure that anyone that looks without a valid reason is punished and possibly prosecuted. In this case 2 people were fired and a third was apparently otherwise disciplined.

It sounds like the supervisor for these workers addressed the situation. But he or she was not politically sensitive enough to realize this could an election issue and therefore neglected to notify their superiors about what happened. If it turns out that one of the people that accessed these files was Karl Rove’s nephew, ok then it might be appropriate to be outraged. But absent that, save the outrage until you actually know what happened. After all, it’s not as though the Bush Whitehouse had requested and accessed the confidential FBI files of prominent Democrats from the Clinton Administration.