All 3 candidates’ files breached

State Department workers improperly snooped in the passport files of all three major presidential candidates, officials said Friday, a disclosure that prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to take the unusual step of delivering a round of personal apologies.

An investigation begun this week revealed that since last summer, a State Department staff trainee and three contract workers in the department’s passport office had poked through passport application files containing the Social Security numbers and other personal information of the presidential hopefuls.

Officials said they think the workers were motivated by nothing more than “imprudent curiosity,” but they have not ruled out more serious motives and have asked the department’s inspector general to investigate.

Rice told reporters Friday morning that she had called Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to apologize.

“I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file,” Rice said she told Obama. “None of us wants a circumstance where any American’s passport files are looked at in an unauthorized way.”

Rice later called Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) to express similar sentiments and to promise that the State Department would get to the bottom of the issue, officials said.

The incidents came to light Thursday evening with the disclosure that the three contract workers had rifled Obama’s file between Jan. 9 and March 14. State Department officials began conducting additional checks and by Friday morning had discovered that supervisors in the passport office knew of incidents involving all three candidates.

The disclosures prompted concern from the candidates and alarm from privacy advocates and critics of the Bush administration. Theories that the incidents were driven by political motives permeated the blogosphere.

In 1992 the passport file of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton was ransacked. A three-year, $2.2-million investigation by an independent counsel concluded that no laws had been broken, but that the officials involved were guilty of actions deemed “stupid, dumb and indeed partisan.” A Republican political appointee at the State Department was demoted.

McCain, traveling Friday in Paris, said that any victim of privacy violations “deserves an apology and a full investigation.”

Obama said he wanted a congressional probe into the incidents, while Hillary Clinton’s campaign said in a statement that she intended to “closely monitor” the State Department’s investigation.

Two of the contract workers have been fired. The third has been disciplined, and the trainee has been “admonished.”

The three contract workers were among 2,600 contract employees that the State Department uses to help an overburdened operation that last year turned out 18 million passports.

Officials declined to identify the firms employing the disciplined workers.

However, a Virginia firm, Stanley Inc., which holds several large government contracts, confirmed Friday that two employees of a subcontractor were involved in accessing Obama’s passport records and were fired the day the unauthorized search took place.

Stanley officials said they didn’t know whether any of their employees improperly snooped in files for McCain or Clinton.

“While this is a rare occurrence, we regret the unauthorized access of any individual’s private information,” the company said in a statement.

Stanley was awarded a new, $570-million passport contract this week; it also runs government facilities in Vermont, Arizona, Arkansas and California.

Its California contract is for work at a Laguna Niguel office that processes immigration and citizenship applications.

The State Department will try to determine whether the workers broke any laws and whether the supervisors broke any rules by failing to inform superiors of the incidents.

If the inspector general concludes that the breaches broke the law, State Department officials will ask the Justice Department to investigate.

State Department officials insisted the episode showed that their system for guarding against privacy violations had worked.

But they acknowledged that supervisors should have passed information about the infractions up the chain of command and said that rule changes are possible.

“We do feel like the system worked, but the system isn’t perfect,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in his regular daily briefing.

Passport files contain basic information individuals must give the government to obtain a passport, including date of birth, address and Social Security number. They often contain information on family members, travel destinations and dates, and contact phone numbers.

Some files also include information the government gathers in determining if an individual is a citizen and thus entitled to a passport.

Officials said they could not be certain what information on Obama, Clinton and McCain was available in the files the workers accessed.

Social Security numbers and dates of birth are valuable to people trying to break into financial records or commit identity theft.

Analysts speculated that there could be commercial motives as well, noting that celebrities like pop singer Britney Spears have had medical and other records ransacked by people hoping to sell the information to tabloids.

The State Department has an electronic system that monitors the files of high- profile Americans -- including politicians and celebrities. Each time they are accessed, a supervisor is sent an electronic report. It then is up to the supervisor to determine whether the file was improperly breached.

The system was put in place after the 1992 incident involving Bill Clinton’s records.

Two House committees said they would look into the issue. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asked Rice to provide details on the companies involved.

The breaches could fall under federal privacy laws, and the individuals involved could be prosecuted if there were evidence that they sought to disseminate the information publicly, perhaps for partisan political purposes, according to legal experts.

Also worrisome, they said, was the State Department’s inability to track such activity.

“People’s rights were violated, and those people have the right to know who accessed their information, what of their information was accessed, why it was accessed and whether it was disseminated to anybody,” said Michael Zeldin, a Washington lawyer and former independent counsel involved in the 1992 Clinton case.

The latest disclosures, he said, appear to be a case of history repeating itself.

“What was wrong in the State Department that allowed this to occur?” Zeldin asked. “It seems that . . . here is another example of the State Department’s inspector general’s office potentially asleep at the switch.”

paul.richter@latimes.com

Times staff writer Richard B. Schmitt in Washington contributed to this report.