At the same time that those imprudently curious (or would that be curiously imprudent) State Department contractors were snooping around in Barack Obama’s passport files, the Department was also moving to make it easier for a lot more people, including foreign governments, to look at yours. Our colleague Brian Bennett has discovered:
Under new guidelines printed in the federal registry on January 9, the same day Obama’s records were first breached, the Bureau of Consular Affairs allows the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Counter-Terrorism Center, “foreign governments, and entities such as Interpol” to link into the same system. The expanded access is designed, according to the notice signed by recently retired head of the Bureau of Consular Affairs Maura Harty, to be used “for counter-terrorism and other purposes such as border security and fraud prevention.” The changes went into effect on February 25, after a 40 day review period. The State Department has yet to respond to TIME’s requests for comment on the changes.
The expanded access does not appear to be related to the breaches of the candidates’ records. But privacy experts are concerned nonetheless, because the move is part of a trend in which more and more of citizens’ personal information is being put at the fingertips of a growing number of government employees. Hundreds of such expansions are happening across the government every year, says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute. “Federal databases are knitting themselves together into larger databases,” says Harper; “we have to worry about the privacy consequences and personal security consequences for average Americans.” Administration officials routinely justify linking databases as a key part of rooting out terrorists.