Report: Obama’s Verizon Records Hacked

CNN is reporting that Verizon Wireless records from a cell phone used by President-elect Obama were improperly breached, apparently by employees of the cell phone company, his transition team announced Thursday.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs said the team was “notified Wednesday by Verizon Wireless that it appears an employee improperly went through billing records for the phone,” which Gibbs said Obama no longer uses, according to the CNN report. Gibbs said that anyone viewing the records likely would have been able to see phone numbers and the frequency of calls Obama made, but that “nobody was monitoring voicemail or anything like that.”

The report said that the phone was a simple flip phone, so it was unlikely that any of Obama’s e-mail was accessed during the breach. (We’re not as certain as CNN is on that score, since there are a few ways to access e-mail with flip feature phones, but just about none of them involve storing the messages on the phone itself, BlackBerry-style.)

Currently the Verizon employees involved are still at work, though they could lose their jobs or face legal action if it turns out the access wasn’t part of routine work with “legitimate business purposes.”

(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via CNN)

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