SAN FRANCISCO -- A former longtime U.S. State Department employee in San Francisco was charged with peeking at - and sometimes printing out - passport applications of more than 100 celebrities, records show.
Richard G. Macias, a 24-year passport agency employee until his retirement in May, was charged in U.S. District Court in San Francisco with three misdemeanor counts of exceeding authorized computer access. He was accused in a document known as an information, which in federal court typically signals that a defendant intends to plead guilty to at least one charge.
In an interview Thursday, Macias, a 60-year-old El Cerrito resident, confirmed that he intended to enter a guilty plea but insisted that his viewing of the applications was related to his work. He declined to name the celebrities involved "for obvious reasons."
"I think they exaggerated some of it," Macias said of investigators. "Nothing was ever sold or turned over to any third party, ever."
Macias had most recently served as fraud prevention manager and was responsible for designing programs to prevent passport fraud and "identify fraud vulnerabilities and trends," authorities said.
But between 2003 and 2009, Macias improperly logged on to the State Department's passport records system 168 times to view the applications of actors, models and musicians, authorities said. The celebrities were not named.
"On 88 of those occasions when he viewed passport applications, defendant Macias printed 129 copies of such applications, a number of them numerous times," the charging document said. "Defendant Macias had no official government reason to access, view or print any of these passport applications."
The case was investigated by the State Department's Office of Inspector General.
This article appeared on page C - 8 of the San�Francisco�Chronicle
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