Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice apologized in the name of the State Department for the unauthorized breach in the passport files of America’s three presidential candidates left in the contest for the White House.

The people responsible for this – four State Department employees: one staff trainee and three contract workers – paid for their mistake. Two contract workers of the Department were fired and a third received disciplinary punishment for separately viewing Brack Obama’s passport file in January, February and March.

Rice called Obama Friday morning to express her regrets about the incident, but as soon as the Secretary of State ended her phone chat with the Illinois Senator, she was informed by the State Department that the passport files of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. John McCain have also been viewed without authorization. So, she had to make two more calls to apologize to the presidential candidates.

Sen. Obama told reporters in Portland, Ore, that he expects “a full and thorough investigation” that “should be done in conjunction with those congressional committees that have oversight function so it’s not simply an internal matter.”

"We are going to do an investigation through the inspector general, who will get to the bottom of it and make certain that nothing more was going on," Rice said.

According to officials’ statement on the issue, the State Department employees were driven to make the mistake by nothing more than "imprudent curiosity". Off course, this remains the official version until the investigation carried out by the department's Inspector General is concluded.

The State Department holds approximately 200 million passport files containing the passport applications of each individual. This includes raw information such as each applicant’s Social Security number and physical description, but besides this info, there’s nothing of big importance.

The investigation will determine whether the State Department employees broke any law, but unless the information contained in the passport files was disclosed to an unauthorized person, the four probably did not violate any law.

The “curios” employees were caught viewing without authorization because of a computer-monitoring system that is triggered when the passport file of a “high-profile person” is accessed.