Rice apologizes to Obama for passport hack

WASHINGTON, March 21 (UPI) -- U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has apologized to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., for three unauthorized looks at his passport files.

"I told him that 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," Rice said before her meeting with Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim in Washington.

The department's inspector general is conducting an investigation, she said.

Two State Department contract employees lost their jobs and a third was disciplined for looking up Obama's passport information without authorization. A monitoring system was tripped when Obama's records were accessed, most recently March 14.

"It appears on the first examination that indeed the system worked, in that there is a flag that goes up if there's any unauthorized look into files of that kind," Rice said.

However, senior management should have been notified and wasn't "to my knowledge," she said.

"None of us wants to have a circumstance in which any American's passport file is looked at in an unauthorized way," she said.