March 21, 2008, Your passport to political adventure
The first and still most logical reaction to the announced kerfuffle that each of the three remaining candidates (Clinton, McCain and Obama, in alphabetical order) had their passport files "breached" by State Department contract employees is "wtf"?. The first announced "breach" was of Obama, and his file was accessed three times (at key moments in the primary cycle) while McCain's and Clinton's were accessed once each, at different times, though in McCain's case, by one of the same accessors.
The first hope one has is the notion that maybe the powerful needed to be reminded once in a while that the rest of us have to live in the national security state that they seem to be hellbent on creating; even they--notwithstanding their vaunted positions as senators and presidential hopefuls-- are still American citizens who our esteemed government can arbitrarily spy on and gather dirt upon, like anyone else.
Still... it certainly strikes me (until proven otherwise) that the target of this adventure is Obama... perhaps, someone is trying to conveniently place him in Afghanistan or some other locale where he might have secretly met with his al-Qaeda overlords? With the "breaches" of Clinton being "a training mistake" and of McCain being unexplained, other than that it was done by one of the three contractors who accessed Obama's file (and two of the three contractors have been fired), I think it's safe to say that Obama-- who has demanded an investigation-- appears to be "the most" injured party here, fwiw, which ain't much at the moment.
For Team Obama, anything that takes the Rev. Wright off the front-page has to be welcome, particuarly as there will be no results of primaries or caucuses for another month or so to do the talking instead. In some sense, this is a "Murder on the Orient Express" situation; dirty tricks operatives abound not only in the Clinton and McCain campaigns, but throughout the Bush Administration, and it is not inconceivable that Obama's own team had something to do with this (see above re: Rev. Wright). Who shall we suspect? How about everyone.
Don't know. Again, anyone who thinks that they somehow have a reasonable degree of privacy for information in the hands of our government or any business that does business with our government... is not thinking clearly. It's all a matter of degree. We'll see if this is a wake-up call to anyone, or just another stop on a long campaign trail.