(Eagle News)–Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. has said the Department of Foreign Affairs’ former passport maker has run off with all passport applicants’ data.
Locsin made the revelation as he urged those renewing their passports to bring their birth certficates with them as a result.
DFA Assistant Secretary Elmer Cato said the birth certificates should be brought by applicants renewing brown or green passports or maroon machine-readable ones because “we need to capture and store the document in our database as we no longer have the physical copy of the document submitted when they first applied.”
According to Locsin, the former contractor, which was outsourced, made off with the data, which is supposed to be of the state, because “it got pissed when (we) terminated (the contract).”
“We did nothing about it or couldn’t because we were in the wrong. It won’t happen again. Passports pose national security issues and cannot be kept back by private entities,” Locsin said.
