Passport-Gate Snooping … Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama late Playboy playmate Anna Nicole Smith

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Anna Nicole Smith. There is a list of names that no one would have ever thought mentioned in the same sentence.

What is going on at the State Department? First Barack Obama’s camp cried foul as they tried to make the breach of Obama’s passport file an attempted political hack attack against the Democratic presidential candidate. Then we would later learn that the files of Hillary Clinton and John McCain were also breached. Now, it is reported that the passport file of former Playmate and the late Anna Nicole Smith were accessed over 20 times since January 2007. Do employees at the State Department have nothing better to do these days? Are they board? Maybe they do not need to be employed. In a day an age of identity theft, it’s nice to see that security breaches might be coming from the State Department itself.

An internal department review has found the additional instances of department employees or contractors looking at computerized passport files of politicians and celebrities, according to preliminary results.

It has not been determined if the new cases also involved improper peeking, officials familiar with the review said Wednesday. Smith’s case, however, seems legitimate, the officials said. The review is not complete and the exact number of cases was not yet clear.

Supervisors recorded each instance a file was viewed because the applications in question belonged to members of a select group of several hundred citizens whose passport files were “flagged” for extra protection due to their visibility, the officials said. Among these people are government leaders, movie stars and athletes, the officials said.

The list maintained by Bureau of Consular Affairs has included as many as 500 people at any one time, they said. The list is kept secret partly to deter workers from making unauthorized inquiries into high-profile records. Although there are no formal criteria for inclusion, people on the list are deemed to warrant special consideration because of their public status, the officials said.