Our View: Government can't keep your secrets

It may be that the instances the State Department has admitted to — of breaching the privacy of the passport files of presidential candidates Barack Obama, John McCain and Hillary Clinton — were an essentially innocent case of imprudent curiosity. It is worth remembering, however, that in 1992, when then-candidate Bill Clinton's passport file was breached, the initial explanation was equally innocent, but it turned out that it was a politically motivated operation to find something with which to smear Mr. Clinton.

More importantly, however, it is, as privacy expert Jim Harper at the libertarian Cato Institute told us, a "signaling mechanism" that shows that government cannot always be trusted to keep private information private. And the delay in notifying the candidates until news stories had appeared suggests that government employees are not swift to do the right thing.

Considering how much information the government collects, and the additional information it wants to collect and put in one place through mechanisms like the "Real ID" act, this is very troubling.

Sen. Clinton's information was accessed last July by a trainee, who put Mrs. Clinton's name in during a training exercise and was immediately "admonished." Sens. McCain's and Obama's passport files were accessed by people working for private companies with contracts to do data processing for the State Department. Two of the three were fired, and a third might be.

Unfortunately, security breaches of private information held by the government are not as rare as one might hope. Just this week it was discovered that a laptop computer was stolen containing sensitive medical information on 2,500 patients in a National Institutes of Health study, and it took a month before the victims were notified. The Government Accountability Office reported this month that at least 19 of 24 agencies it studied had at least one breach of information that could have led to identity theft.

It is also troubling that, while the State Department says it has a system to trigger attention when the files of a "high-profile person" are breached, it has no such system for us ordinary citizens.

Lesson: The government can't be trusted to keep private information private.