State Dept. Contractor Charged in Passport Breach
Passport files of presidential candidates were illegally searched.
Sept. 16, 2008 — -- A former government official involved in breaching the passport files of presidential contenders is expected to plead guilty next week.
Lawrence Yontz, a contractor working at the State Department, was charged last week in a criminal information filed by the Justice Department on federal charges of unauthorized computer access. A criminal information is a court document filed by prosecutors charging a suspect with a crime, versus an indictment, which is returned by a grand jury.
David H. Laufman, Yontz's attorney, confirmed that his client was scheduled to appear before a federal magistrate in Washington, D.C., for a plea hearing set for Monday.
In March, reports surfaced that several individuals, with access to the State Department's confidential passport records, had broken privacy rules and looked into the passport files of presidential hopefuls Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
While the indictment does not say which candidates' files Yontz looked into, it alleges his snooping may have been more widespread than previously reported.
According to the criminal charge filed at the U.S. District Court in Washington, Yontz allegedly obtained information in the passport files belonging to "various celebrities, athletes, actors, politicians and their immediate families, musicians, game show contestants, members of the media corps, prominent business professionals, colleagues, associates, neighbors, and individuals identified in the press."
The database, known as the Passport Information Electronic Records System, typically includes the applicant's name, gender, Social Security number, date and place of birth, and passport number. According to the court records filed in the case, Yontz allegedly reviewed information in the PIERS system from February 2005 through March 2008.
A heavily redacted State Department Inspector General report on the matter, released in July, found "many control weaknesses" to prevent unauthorized access to an individual's passport file, "including a general lack of policies, procedures, guidance, and training."
The IG report quotes officials in the State Department's bureau of Consular Affairs, which handles passport applications, as saying that, as of May 2008, 20,500 people had access to the passport file system, the majority of whom were contractors.
A study by the Office of Inspector General generated a list of 150 prominent Americans, including politicians, athletes and celebrities, and found that 127 of them had their records accessed at least once. The results also showed that each of those records was accessed 4,148 times. Nine individuals had their files accessed at least 100 times, including one individual whose files were accessed 356 times.
State Department officials could not say how many of those were accessed for valid reasons and said it was "possible but unlikely" that they were all authorized.
In response to the controversy, Consular Affairs cut the number of individuals with access to passport files and increased the number of oversight monitors. The department also fired four people found to have improperly looked into the presidential candidates' files, and another was fired for other snooping breaches.
Citing privacy restrictions, the State Department would not name which other individuals' passport files were breached.