I more so blame the administrator who allowed them to have these passwords (and of course whoever was storing them in plaintext).

The reality is that employees can't be trusted to manage password strength. But it's trivial to implement a validation scheme that forces employees to be over a minimum length, use special characters, etc. Of course this is also not great -- and inevitably we'd see Pa$$word123 -- but it's at least a starting point.

fired? seriously?

I don't know if i agree with fired but if you work for the fbi, you probably have some access to non-public information, some people have classified or high clearance levels. If you can't manage to have a password that matches patterns that people warn you to avoid for your facebook let alone your fbi password maybe your supervisor should reevaluate what level of trust you should be given

Since it's just the FBI then I would make it a retraining issue. And the sysadmin with such pathetic password policy should get some ass chewing.

Whoever wrote the code that stored these values in plaintext (if that is indeed the case) should definitely get the boot.

If this was the NSA or CIA I would fire them all and shoot the person who coded it. :o)

Or whoever is in charge of tech security, yes. I think the whole Wikileaks-State-Dept. episode showed how a global system can be undermined by the weakest link.

Would we be surprised if someone got fired from Google or Microsoft for making internal information readily available to the first idiot who tried?

Google and Microsoft build systems that don't allow weak passwords. Security is a process, not a person.