Third State Department worker pleads guilty to passport snooping

IDG News Service - A third former employee of the U.S. Department of State has pleaded guilty to illegally accessing the electronic passport application files of Barack Obama and dozens of other politicians and celebrities in a snooping case that came to light last March.

Gerald Lueders, 65, of Woodbridge, Va., entered the guilty plea yesterday in U.S. District Court in Washington, admitting to a single count of unauthorized computer access, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

In his guilty plea, Lueders acknowledged that between July 2005 and last February, he logged into the State Department's Passport Information Electronic Records System (PIERS) and viewed the passport applications of more than 50 politicians, actors, musicians, athletes, members of the media and other people.

The DOJ said Lueders admitted that he had no official government reason to access and view the passport files and that his sole purpose for doing so was "idle curiosity."

Lueders was part of a small group of State Department employees and contractors who were charged after the disclosure that workers at the agency had accessed the passport files of then-Sen. Obama and fellow presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain without authorization. The inspector general's office at the State Department later found that the breaches of the PIERS database had been more widespread than at first thought.

For instance, the inspector general looked at the passport files of 150 politicians, entertainers and athletes and found that 127 of the files had been improperly accessed at least once between September 2002 and last March. The 127 files were accessed a total of 4,148 times during that time frame, and one was viewed 356 times by 77 users, according to the inspector general.

Those reports prompted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to call for prosecutions of the passport snoopers, who ignored privacy warnings built into PIERS notifying users that the passport information could only be accessed on a "need-to-know" basis.

Lueders worked as a foreign service officer at the State Department from June 1974 to September 2001, then was employed as a "watch officer" at the agency's Bureau of Consular Affairs from late 2005 until last February. As part of his jobs, he had access to PIERS, which contains files on all passport applications dating back to 1994. The applications contain an applicant's date and place of birth, current address, emergency contact information and other personal data.

The files are protected by the Privacy Act of 1974, and access by State Department employees is strictly limited to official government duties, the DOJ said.

Lueders, who is scheduled to be sentenced on March 26, is the third current or former State Department employee to plead guilty as part of the continuing investigation into the snooping incidents.

In September, Lawrence Yontz, a former foreign service officer and intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty to unlawfully accessing hundreds of confidential passport files. Yontz, a Virginia resident, was sentenced last month to 12 months of probation and ordered to perform 50 hours of community service.

And on Jan. 14, Dwayne Cross, a former administrative assistant and contract specialist who lives in Maryland, admitted to a similar charge. Cross is scheduled to be sentenced on March 23.