Thread: Barack Obama's citizenship questioned

A formalized objection to the Chief Justice conducting the swearing in was sent by Orly Taitz as lawyer for the Lightfoot and Keyes lawsuits, based on conflict of interest. It also took advantage of some historical research which found that judges other than Supreme Court judges have administered the oath of office.

Meanwhile, because of that Newsmax article recently which claimed that the break-in to Obama's passport file might have attempted to "cauterize" what was electronically digitally imaged into it, I went searching for other news reports which might explore whether that was even possible. (I was hoping that the data is set up as "Read Only" and completely secure from online tampering.) I found this article which was the one that first broke the news, from the Washington Times. In fact, it was a reporter at that paper who seems to have gotten a tip that there was a break-in (from who???) and turned right around to inquire with the State Department about it, and his questioning is what launched the whole probe.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/ma ... on-worker/

Passports probe focuses on worker
Saturday, March 22, 2008

The State Department investigation of improper computer access to passport records of three presidential candidates is focusing on one remaining employee — a contract worker with a company headed by an adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama


Getty Images State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy (left) walked to a meeting with Senate staff members on Capitol Hill yesterday to talk about breaches of confidential passport files belonging to presidential hopefuls Sen. John McCain, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

The probe by State's inspector general will include polygraph tests for supervisors in the passport section to find out whether the three contract employees who accessed the records had a political motive or were part of a political operation to obtain personal data on Mr. Obama, Sen. John McCain or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Two of the three contract employees had been fired before The Washington Times first reported Thursday on security breaches involving Mr. Obama's passport records. The furor expanded yesterday to incidents involving the passport records of Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton.

The third employee, who has not been fired, worked for The Analysis Corporation (TAC), which is headed by John O. Brennan, a former CIA agent who is an adviser to Mr. Obama's presidential campaign on intelligence and foreign policy.

The TAC employee is the only individual to have accessed both Mr. Obama's and Mr. McCain's passport information without proper authorization, a State Department spokesman said. That employee, who was not named, triggered an electronic alarm system, officials familiar with the probe said.

The accessed records have the data provided in passport applications and used by the department to issue or renew travel documents.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said he was unaware of the specific activities of the IG investigation but said all three contract employees will be questioned.

Video: Candidates' passport files pried into

Fishwrap: Was passport breach dirty tricks, or overblown fluke?


State Department officials said Thursday and yesterday that the intrusions appeared to be the result of "imprudent curiosity" on the part of contract employees who were hired last summer to help process passport applications.

In Portland, Ore., Mr. Obama said the series of attempts to "tap into people's personal records" were "a problem not just for me but for how our government functions."

"I expect a full and thorough investigation. It should be done in conjunction with those congressional committees that have oversight so it's not simply an internal matter," Mr. Obama told reporters.

Mr. McCain, who is traveling in France, called for an apology and a full investigation of the breach. "The United States of America values everyone's privacy and corrective action should be taken," he said.

Mrs. Clinton had not publicly commented by yesterday evening.

Mr. McCormack said the investigation also will determine whether the records of other high-profile political candidates were accessed improperly and whether there are "systemic" problems.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice promised that the department will carry out a "full investigation" and expressed anger about the breaches, as well as the failure to notify senior officials.

"It should have been known to senior management. It was not, to my knowledge. And we also want to take every step that we can to make sure that this kind of thing doesn't happen again," she said, adding apologies to all three candidates, starting with Mr. Obama.

"I was sorry and I told him that I myself would be very disturbed if I learned that somebody had looked into my passport file," Miss Rice said of her telephone apology yesterday to the Illinois senator. She also called Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain.

Officials do not know whether information was improperly copied, altered or removed from the database during the intrusions.

"We are looking at [whether] there is anything more to why these people did this other than inappropriate curiosity," said Patrick F. Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, who is in charge of the passport offices.

State Department officials met for about 90 minutes with the Senate staffs of each candidate, along with the staff of Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has jurisdiction over the Foreign Service.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, sent a letter to Miss Rice demanding to know the names of the contract employees.

Besides the TAC employee, the State Department said the other two employees worked for Stanley Inc., a 3,500-person technology firm based in Arlington that this week won a $570 million contract to continue providing passport services to the State Department, work the company has done since 1992.

TAC, a McLean-based information firm that has helped the State Department automate the Terrorist Watchlist over the last several years, issued a statement last night that it had been notified earlier in the day that one of its contractors had acted improperly. The firm said it had honored a State Department request not to fire its consultant to help the investigation.

"This individual's actions were taken without the knowledge or direction of anyone at TAC and are wholly inconsistent with our professional and ethical standards," the company wrote.

Calls to the Obama campaign about Mr. Brennan were not returned.

Mr. McCormack said yesterday there was a fourth person who breached the passport records, although he described it as a case of inadvertance. He said a passport office trainee last year was learning how to work with passport electronic records and searched for Mrs. Clinton's file as a test, but was "immediately admonished, and it didn't happen again."

Working-level supervisors confronted the three employees after a computer alarm system was triggered by the effort to access Mr. Obama's records.

"What didn't happen is that that information didn't rise up to senior management levels, so that we could be made aware of it. That should have happened," Mr. McCormack said.

If senior officials were alerted to the intrusions, additional safeguards would have been used to protect the data, Mr. McCormack said.

Officials said the computer alarm that was set off includes a notification mechanism that should have alerted State's inspector general. However, it is not clear whether the IG reviewed the improper computer activities, the officials said.

Acting Inspector General William E. Todd and the chief IG branch investigator, James B. Burch, a former U.S. Secret Service agent, are leading the passport probe, which began Thursday. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said his department was no reason yet to investigate.

Miss Rice and Mr. Kennedy did not learn of the breaches of Mr. Obama's personal data until The Times e-mailed questions about the security breaches on Thursday.

"As soon as we realized that there were these unauthorized accesses for Senator Obama's passport files, we collected the information, we briefed the secretary, we briefed Senator Obama's staff, all before we ever replied to the reporter," Mr. McCormack said.

"Then we replied to the reporter, and then we all talked to the rest of you as the questions came in," he said.

The video link in that original article is dead now, but the link to the Forums has a lot of interesting material from around that time.

http://video1.washingtontimes.com/fishw ... a_p_1.html

The investigation at State Dept. launched in March led to testimony on Capitol Hill on July 10, 2008 (scroll down to find that date)

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/speeches/2008/

There had been an official report filed the prior week. I don't know if the Congress people got to see the version without any blacked out pages, but the version released to the press had a lot of black ink applied.

http://oig.state.gov/documents/organization/109112.pdf

In addition to the 104 page report, there was a six page reply from Acting Assistant secretary for administration William H. Moser that agreed with the recommendations of the report. Only one paragraph was readable in the version given to reporters. All the rest had been blacked out.

Less than a month ago, the identity of one of the people who broke into the files was revealed with this article about a sentencing (probation and community service).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... =sec-metro

[

size=24]Former Contractor Gets Probation in Passport Files Case[/size]
By Del Quentin Wilber
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 19, 2008; 10:53 AM

A former State Department contractor was sentenced today to a year's probation for improperly accessing the passport files of nearly 200 celebrities, politicians, actors and athletes.

Lawrence C. Yontz, 48, apologized for his conduct and said he only viewed the files for his "own personal curiosity."

The Arlington resident pleaded guilty in September to one count of unauthorized computer access, admitting that he logged onto a computer system to illegally access the files between February 2005 and March. He is the only person to have been charged since authorities learned in March that contract workers had snooped in the private passport files of Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), among others.

Prosecutors have not said whose files Yontz accessed, and that information was not part of the plea agreement.

Prosecutors and Yontz's attorney, David H. Laufman, told a federal judge in the District during a brief hearing that Yontz did not sell or provide the information he gleaned from the files to others. Yontz cooperated extensively with authorities, passed a polygraph examination and agreed to plead guilty to a crime before the Justice Department got involved in the case, said prosecutor Armando O. Bonilla.

Yontz is also assisting investigators in an unrelated criminal investigation, Bonilla said.

In sentencing Yontz to probation and 50 hours of community service, U.S. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola told the former contractor that "the damage you did to yourself is greater than the damage you did to others." Yontz, who is unemployed, worked for the State Department from 1987 through 1996. From 2004 through March, he worked for an unidentified contracting firm at the State Department. An audit launched after the passport-snooping was discovered found "weaknesses, including a general lack of policies, procedures, guidance and training" in the office that stores data on 127 million Americans who hold passports.

One celebrity's records were breached 356 times by more than six dozen people, the audit found.

If he was one of the three unidentified people mentioned in the original report, and if he was fired as the dates bold-faced above suggest, then he logically would have been working for Stanley, Inc. which was claimed to have two of the three contractor employees and to have fired both.

It's interesting that there is this "unrelated" other investigation going on.

I find this to be very interesting:

State Department officials met for about 90 minutes with the Senate staffs of each candidate, along with the staff of Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has jurisdiction over the Foreign Service.

I wonder if this had any influence on the VP nomination. Handy, the man in charge of the senate portion of the investigation gets nominated. Biden has a long record of cheating and plagiarism, which Obama pointed out how untrustworthy he was in the early primaries. What made Obama change his mind? Could it simply be he had to power and lack of morals to make Obama's biggest problem go away if Obama chose him?

Originally Posted by cayla99

Originally Posted by HighlanderJuan

Chief Justice John Roberts meets Obama in private

To say I was floored when I read the news item is an understatement. A 'ceremonial' meeting between a president elect and justices of the Supreme Court is somewhat traditional. HOWEVER, in this instance, it's flat out wrong. Chief Justice Roberts has cases on the docket where Obama is the defendant or is the subject of the litigation. Roberts and the other eight justices have already held two 'Distribution for Conferences' on the Donofrio and Wrotnoski cases on Obama's citizenship ineligibility. They just turned away one of Phil Berg's cases a few days ago; that one is still in the Third Circuit.

Tomorrow is the fourth case; another.......

http://www.newswithviews.com/Devvy/kidd428.htm

by Devvy Kidd

It is over boys and girls, we will NEVER IN OUR LIFETIMES know the truth. Unless the invitation included ps bring your original vault cert, school records, adoption records ect....... which we all know it did not.

If people decided to break into where his crap is locked up then we could expose him for good!!

My sister watched Jepardy a week or 2 after the election.

She said one of the questions was,

"WHAT STATE WAS BARAK OBAMA BORN IN?"

They state the correct answer is Hawaii.

Oh really.

In God we trust.

"It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes." - Ps. 118:9

I'll be back when I have something encouraging to say.

Originally Posted by CCUSA

My sister watched Jepardy a week or 2 after the election.

She said one of the questions was,

"WHAT STATE WAS BARAK OBAMA BORN IN?"

They state the correct answer is Hawaii.

Oh really.

I would have said Kenya. That's one of the 57 states, isn't it?

Originally Posted by HighlanderJuan

Originally Posted by CCUSA

My sister watched Jepardy a week or 2 after the election.

She said one of the questions was,

"WHAT STATE WAS BARAK OBAMA BORN IN?"

They state the correct answer is Hawaii.

Oh really.

I would have said Kenya. That's one of the 57 states, isn't it?

I would laugh but this is not funny.

Please check eligibility, thousands ask Supremes

Another round of urgent requests delivered to high court
Posted: January 16, 2009
12:10 am Eastern

© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Thousands of urgent appeals for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the question of Barack Obama's eligibility to be president of the United States are being delivered to the justices as part of WND's campaign to seek the truth.

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=86252

Originally Posted by HighlanderJuan

Please check eligibility, thousands ask Supremes

Another round of urgent requests delivered to high court
Posted: January 16, 2009
12:10 am Eastern

© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Thousands of urgent appeals for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the question of Barack Obama's eligibility to be president of the United States are being delivered to the justices as part of WND's campaign to seek the truth.

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=86252

I wonder if all of these suits were a topic of conversation during the little meeting with the defendant that the chief justice had.