White House investigates as leak of leaders’ details

The White House says it is investigating the leak of Barack Obama’s personal information arising from his G20 visit to Australia.

The White House says it is invest­igating the leak of Barack Obama’s personal information, including passport and visa details, arising from the US President’s G20 visit to Australia.

Labor and the Greens yesterday said the government needed to explain why the “profoundly embarrassing” blunder that saw the details of 31 world leaders sent to the incorrect recipient by a Department of Immigration ­employee was not disclosed to those affected.

The government has said human error and the autofill email address function resulted in the personal information being accidentally released.

Officials decided not to disclose the breach to the affected leaders because it was determined the breach was inconsequential.

White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz told reporters on Air Force One the accid­ental disclosure was being investigated.

“I can tell you that we’re looking into them,” he said.

“We’ll take all appropriate steps necessary to ensure the privacy and security of the President’s personal information.”

The Hindustan Times reported that the office of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “chose not to react” to the reports, but a senior government official said: “We have seen the report and will take necessary action at our end on the matter.”

Labor immigration spokesman Richard Marles said the government’s failure to report the privacy breach to the foreign leaders had “taken our national embarrassment to a global stage”.

He called on the government to provide a guarantee no further information had been “leaked” and an explanation as to why the leaders were not informed.

“It would appear that those countries have learnt about it from the media, given that the government did not regard this as serious enough at the time to notify world leaders themselves,” he said.

Greens senator Scott Ludlam said the breach highlighted the ­potential risk to customer communications data, which the government will store under its new metadata retention laws for two years from 2017.

Senator Ludlam said that the ­government should urgently ­introduce a new privacy alert scheme.

“If the information of world leaders can be breached then what will happen when thousands of people from a range of agencies have access to the metadata of 23 million Australians as a result of the government and ­the opposition’s data retention reg­ime?” he said.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton declined to comment yesterday, but a spokeswoman for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection said that the data was “immediately deleted by the recipient and was not distributed further.”

“The department has reviewed and strengthened its email protocols to limit and contain future breaches,” she said.

It has emerged that, on ­November 7 last year, personal ­details including the passport numbers and visa details of Mr Obama, Mr Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Indonesian President Joko Widodo and British Prime Minister David Cameron were all ­exposed.

As revealed in The Australian yesterday, the department has since introduced a new email ­policy preventing the autofill function of email addresses.