Obama cellphone snoopers fired
Barack Obama has yet to take office, but he’s already seen the first job losses of his presidency. Fortunately it’s nothing to do with policy decisions: the newly unemployed are workers caught snooping through Obama’s cellphone records.
As Dave Jeyes reported on Friday, Verizon suspended several employees who had accessed Obama’s personal cell phone account without permission, pending investigation.
There’s been no official update from Verizon, but CNN reports a source saying an unspecified number of workers have since been fired. It appears they were customer care workers and should only have accessed records as and when that customer specifically required it.
The Obama account was for a personal cellphone without data or e-mail facilities; Obama has not used the phone for several months. The workers will have been able to see the numbers Obama dialed and the times and duration of calls he made and received, but won’t have been able to access voice mails or text message contents.
Though Verizon has reportedly passed on details of the breach to federal authorities, there’s no evidence that there was any malicious or criminal intent by the workers. At the moment it still seems most likely to be down to curious snooping.
This doesn’t answer the question of how the workers were able to access the records. Perhaps Verizon might now consider making it physically impossible for an employee to access a record without getting the customer to answer a security question. However, as the hacking of Sarah Palin’s e-mail proved, standard questions about a customer’s personal life aren’t so effective for public figures.
Julian Sanchez of Arstechnica makes an interesting point for the inevitable ethics debate. Those of a cynical nature might well suspect similar snooping into a random citizen’s phone records wouldn’t always earn a firing. However, Sanchez argues that though everyone has an equal right to privacy, the record of celebrities and public figures will always be the most likely targets for prying eyes, so the deterrence needs to be stronger.
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