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Obama's Mobile Phone Records Compromised, Shared
Tiger4 writes "Verizon has confirmed that some of its employees have accessed and perhaps shared calling records of President Elect Barack Obama (coverage at CNN, Reuters, AP). Verizon says the people involved have all been put on leave with pay as the investigation proceeds. Some of the employees may have accessed the information for legitimate purposes, but others may have been curiosity seekers and may have even shared the information around. The account was 'only' a phone, not a BlackBerry or similar device, and Verizon believes it was just calling records, not voicemail or email that was compromised. The articles do not mention the similarity to the warrantless wiretapping or hospital records compromises of recent months. But that immediately sprang to mind for me."
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
INSTALLING YOUR NIGGER.
You should install your nigger differently according to whether you have purchased the field or house model. Field niggers work best in a serial configuration, i.e. chained together. Chain your nigger to another nigger immediately after unpacking it, and don't even think about taking that chain off, ever. Many niggers start singing as soon as you put a chain on them. This habit can usually be thrashed out of them if nipped in the bud. House niggers work best as standalone units, but should be hobbled or hamstrung to prevent attempts at escape. At this stage, your nigger can also be given a name. Most owners use the same names over and over, since niggers become confused by too much data. Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Yeller, Blackstar, and Sambo are all effective names for your new buck nigger. If your nigger is a ho, it should be called Latrelle, L'Tanya, or Jemima. Some owners call their nigger hoes Latrine for a joke. Pearl, Blossom, and Ivory are also righteous names for nigger hoes. These names go straight over your nigger's head, by the way.
CONFIGURING YOUR NIGGER
Owing to a design error, your nigger comes equipped with a tongue and vocal chords. Most niggers can master only a few basic human phrases with this apparatus - "muh dick" being the most popular. However, others make barking, yelping, yapping noises and appear to be in some pain, so you should probably call a vet and have him remove your nigger's tongue. Once de-tongued your nigger will be a lot happier - at least, you won't hear it complaining anywhere near as much. Niggers have nothing interesting to say, anyway. Many owners also castrate their niggers for health reasons (yours, mine, and that of women, not the nigger's). This is strongly recommended, and frankly, it's a mystery why this is not done on the boat
HOUSING YOUR NIGGER.
Your nigger can be accommodated in cages with stout iron bars. Make sure, however, that the bars are wide enough to push pieces of nigger food through. The rule of thumb is, four niggers per square yard of cage. So a fifteen foot by thirty foot nigger cage can accommodate two hundred niggers. You can site a nigger cage anywhere, even on soft ground. Don't worry about your nigger fashioning makeshift shovels out of odd pieces of wood and digging an escape tunnel under the bars of the cage. Niggers never invented the shovel before and they're not about to now. In any case, your nigger is certainly too lazy to attempt escape. As long as the free food holds out, your nigger is living better than it did in Africa, so it will stay put. Buck niggers and hoe niggers can be safely accommodated in the same cage, as bucks never attempt sex with black hoes.
FEEDING YOUR NIGGER.
Your Nigger likes fried chicken, corn bread, and watermelon. You should therefore give it none of these things because its lazy ass almost certainly doesn't deserve it. Instead, feed it on porridge with salt, and creek water. Your nigger will supplement its diet with whatever it finds in the fields, other niggers, etc. Experienced nigger owners sometimes push watermelon slices through the bars of the nigger cage at the end of the day as a treat, but only if all niggers have worked well and nothing has been stolen that day. Mike of the Old Ranch Plantation reports that this last one is a killer, since all niggers steal something almost every single day of their lives. He reports he doesn't have to spend much on free watermelon for his niggers as a result. You should never allow your nigger meal breaks while at work, since if it stops work for more than ten minutes it will need to be retrained. You would be surprised how long it takes to teach a nigger to pick cotton. You really would. Coffee beans? Don't ask. You have no idea.
MAKING YOUR NIGGER WORK.
Niggers are very, very averse to work of any kind. The nigger's most
Nobody's Safe
Oversight is OK though right? He has nothing to hide.
If he stops the NSA from spying on domestics then I'll take back my comment.
Just wondering how long it will take before this results in some new phone related law...
Some of the employees may have accessed the information for legitimate purposes
Like what?
I doubt if Obama has any problem paying his phone bill.
So this means he WILL have to let go of his Blackberry after all. How secure is data passing to a Blackberry, (the server, towers etc..)?
After 4 years he'll be as out of touch as W was, but I bet the media won't make fun of it unless we are in a depression.
My brother worked at T-Mobile for many years. (since before they were T-Mobile). Most Hollywood stars have their agents get their phones for them. One day, something happened in the payment process, and Val Kilmer came into a store to make a payment on his phone, instead of his agent. Suddenly, his number was getting passed all over the company, and many employees (mostly young girls) actually called the number to talk to him. A ton of people were fired, and Val got a very nice check from T-Mobile.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Most of the media (for example, NPR on the radio today) talks about "unauthorized access by employees", while /. entry is about "sharing" (which is more sinister).
PS. That and unrelated modest and subdued coverage by CNN about yesterday's record Dow-Jones drop remind me of bias in the media.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/2008/nov/12/barack-obama-south-park
While this is improper and wrong, I think that if the government is allowed to wiretap us, then the same laws should make it legal (Freedom of Information Act or something like that) for us to wiretap them. In fact, all government employees' and officials' calls should be recorded and made available for everyone's listening pleasure at a youtube-like site. Call it govtube. Because we are not subservient to the government; it is subservient to us. We put those people in office for our benefit, and so it is our collective right to know what they're doing over there.
A situation like this is why there are so many stupid rules at work that make people less productive. Why USB ports are disabled, or you can't have an iPod, websites like gmail are blocked. The biggest danger of electronic crime and compromising of personal information come from people that work at the company. Same as most shoplifting is done by employees of the store. The solution is, ironically stolen from the government. In order to see personal data (classified information) an employee of the company must, not only have rights to see the information, but must also demonstrate a "need to know". That two factor authentication will eliminate many of the abuses by corporate and government employees (Joe the Plumber's info breach by the state) and clearly put the action into criminal field as apposed to looky loo.
What will Obama take for his trouble? I wonder who he's been chatting with. I see here a few dozen calls to a payphone in Ottawa. For years people were suggesting the USA could annex Canada if a big enough crisis occurred. Little did they know that Canada would annex the USA after a major stock market crash.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
"Verizon says the people involved have all been put on leave with pay..."
Leave WITH pay? Are you joking? This is easily the most offensive "punishment" I've ever heard of. Leave WITH pay is called a VACATION! That's not punishment! I find garbage like this to be more offensive when it's applied to cops who abuse their position or the like but it's simply offensive that any PUNISHMENT would equate with a VACATION. Leave withOUT pay is a punishment.
Simply boggles my mind sometimes...
Never heard of him. You talk as though he was some kind of Super Star like Rajnikant.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Actually you are strangely correct. We should have transcripts of every conversation with lobbyist, campaign contributors, and business relationships. A lack of vision into our corporate and political deal making has lead to many of the abuses over the last decade. If every non-personal conversation by corporate executives and government employees was recorded and made available to the public corruption and graft will be driven further underground.
Every time a celebrity lands themselves in an ER (especially hospitals not accustomed VIPs) then we can expect several violations of HIPAA by unauthorized hospital staff.
They just cannot resist no matter how many times they are warned about activity being logged and threats of dismissal upon violation.
If there is sufficient evidence to connect the suspected employee, they will most likely be fired or worse. Denying the suspected parties their pay is inappropriate until more sufficient evidence is found. Having them show up at work would be inappropriate as well.
No, it's not an ideal situation. But what would you propose?
Sure it's like a vacation. A vacation where you might be fired or charged with a crime. Yeah, I'm jealous.
Shouldn't this be public record anyway?
Since Obama voted for FISA it's only fair that the people have access to those records too. :)
Why is he calling collect to Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Just a happy birthday greeting?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Why would Verizon employees have access to my email? Do the monitor and capture private emails sent through their service?
I thought they were supposed to take away his Blackberry, for national security purposes, since he can't use email as President.
Punch drunk, and without bail.
The President-Elect has a modern day Praetorian Guard protecting him. It would take either a professional team of assassins, or a very, very lucky suicide bomber/shooter to get anywhere near him. Joe the Plumber? Not so much.
Joe what's his name can't help the fact that McCain made him into a working class hero. He also can't help the fact that a number of people on the left wanted to destroy him for having the audacity to ask a hard, serious economic question of Obama that made Obama look bad. One radio host even called for him to be murdered.
So yeah, I'd say that he had more practical security precautions than a man who had the Secret Service protecting him and his immediate family.
You're paying zero taxes. I presume your income is pretty much zero then; Personally I wouldn't brag about that.
But then, people that come up with such pathetic nicknames are probably without much of a life anyway. Tell us, is your room in your parents attic or in the basement? We'd just like to know.
They just cannot resist no matter how many times they are warned about activity being logged and threats of dismissal upon violation.
I've seen the same thing in hospitals I've worked in. It's amazing how unethical and/or weird people act around celebrities especially when they aren't used to seeing them. It's never been clear to me why an actor would be especially interesting to anyone off screen but people just lose their minds. It's bizarre.
In my experience hospitals can reduce (but not eliminate) the HIPAA violations by ensuring that the threats of dismissal for unauthorized record access are actually carried out. It has to be a credible threat. The last hospital I worked at actually did fire people for unauthorized record access. Unfortunately so many people usually have at least semi-legitimate access to the chart that it isn't always clear when violations have occurred and someone has to police it which usually is expensive. Generally only the most egregious violations get caught.
He should have used a carrier other than Verizon. Shame on him for using Verizon. If he gets hacked, who cares? Should have used an official phone for official conversations. /cynicism off
I don't see any ranting and raving the press about the various government agencies that started checking up on Joe the Plumber after his 15 seconds of fame. I guess it's not interesting if Big Brother snoops on ordinary folks.
I worked for T-Mobile as a CSR, it was not uncommon for us to snoop and look at customer records, In Samson you can even search by name, and find all sorts of stuff (much of it useless, a search returning too much info was common), reminds me of an account for Motorola I saw that was past due over 500k. (Motorola wasn't the only one to have accounts like this, many large corporate accounts were much the same)
Its not like we were sharing it among ourselves, or with anyone else, we would just take a peek now and again..
What radio host called for ol' Joe-the-P's murder?
Besides, he's not the only one singled out for death by radio hosts. I've had people call for my death. Who am I? I bike-commuter.
It's our right to know what they're doing as part of their official duties. If the president wants a 15 minute break to talk to his wife with a phone he pays for out-of-pocket, then it's none of our business.
You putzes. What *will* you do when Bush has left the WhiteHouse? Who will you blame everything on?
This is SUCH a bigger story than your lead-in suggests: remember that BOTH candidates were hacked just before the election. It's more likely this is Chinese spying than the current administration looking for terrorists. Don't you KNOW what a ruckus it would cause to be caught at this? Do you think they'd take that chance? And what would the payoff be?
No, this is a force outside the USA, or elements of a foreign group inside. Stay Tuned; we'll know if this information was useful, but it might be revealed 20 years from now on Pravda or such.
"Warrantless Wiretapping", my ass.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Maby? Are you kidding me? Maby? That's hilarious.
It's maybe. It's short for "It may be that..." it means the same thing as "perhaps" - the word you probably know as "praps".
>>That's probably because, with the exception of Fox News,
>>the MSM still has a sliver of integrity left somewhere and
>>won't game the headline that way unless it's possible to
>>prove that the records were actually shared, as opposed
>>to just illegally accessed.
Bwaaaahahahahahahahahahaha!
Gah, that was a good one. If after this election anyone can claim the clearly biased in favor of Obama have any integrity at all...
The sad thing is the MSM is only beginning to realize just how badly they've screwed themselves here, and what they've done to their credibility because of it.
I watched Katie Couric on Letterman the other night shifting and smiling uncomfortably as Dave bounced all over the place congratulating her and the rest of the MSM for their work in getting Obama elected. She just kept on glaring at him with her eyes as her smiles kept getting bigger and bigger...
She knows what Dave doesn't--and that unless the MSM can quickly bury their involvement with this election the American public will remember and discount their biases come next election--something none of the MSM reporters, flacks, and punditry want, but far too many in the entertainment branches are drunk with power and won't SHUT UP about it.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
I have a friend who works for Verizon Wireless and he read me the e-mail that was sent out to Verizon Wireless employees. I am not sure whether the e-mail I was read was released to the public as well but the wording in the article is practically identical. Some of the points made in the e-mail that was read to me were...
That protecting customer data was not just the law but also company policy and in the best interest of gaining and maintaining customer confidence."
Over the past several years we have all read here on slashdot how our private data whether it be medical or financial or relating to whom we communicate with has been released out into the wilds of the internet for public consumption. Either accidentally such as the case of a stolen laptop or given to law enforcement agencies who failed to comply with 4th amendment protections by filing for a warrant or subpoena. Didn't Congress just unanimously vote to grant retroactive immunity from prosecution for their complicity in these violations of the constitution?
The e-mail with which I am familiar states that the account was in fact inactive and was not a smart phone such but rather a flip phone. While it may be the law that they cannot release customer data maliciously I don't know of a law or at least one that has been or will be enforced that would criminalize the actions of the employees who decided to take a "peek" at who our president elect had been calling. In fact the e-mail stated that the employees with legitimate reasons for accessing the information will return to work and those who accessed the data without legitimate reasons will be fired. Not arrested and prosecuted but fired.
This hole seems to just get deeper and deeper with respect to the many ways people find to circumvent privacy and how for the people involved in violating the legal protections or corporate regulations in place to protect that data there seems to be no punishment or consequence. Fast forward a few months and the people who are fired for this are looking for work and give Verizon as a reference. Too bad Verizon cannot say whether they were fired and if so for what but only verify length of employment. These people just move on and do the same thing somewhere else.
Lets see if they get the same slap on the wrist that government employees got for accessing Joe the Plumber's tax records, DMV records, medical records, and other supposedly private information.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Joe was just a guy in Ohio. Obama came to his house to campaign. He wasn't an "operative".
Do you guys even care that you're lying? Your guy won. There's no need to continue to smear and lie about Joe the Plumber.
"...Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us."
far worse.
I can expect and do expect the President to be targets of this type of stuff and to have lots of people assigned to prevent it or minimize the damage. But when the power of government is brought to bear on an individual then it strikes me as very wrong and something that deserves more attention than what happened here.
The simply fact is, abuse of government positions happens all the time but goes unreported because the press does not value the offense. Joe the plumber got run over because to the press he supported the wrong candidate and worse embarrassed their selected candidate. To top it off one of the investigating (read: abusing) government officials also favored the candidate who Joe did not.
You can just go read all the pro-invade Palin's email on the hopes she did something wrong crowd here at /. to reveal just how warped this place has become. The number who defended getting to the email of a mere candidate were astounding and was purely driving my political leaning.
Employees access famous people's account info all the time, just out of curiousity. Such was my experience with co-workers during the summer I spent as a call centre representative at the local hydro company. After having the same phone conversation 100 times a day, people needed something to entertain them. "OMG Wayne Gretzky missed a bill payment back in 1997!!!!"
Think about it... people believe you can't stop drugs because people are attracted to them and there is an almost infinite amount of money to be made. Well, same with phone and hospital records.
OK, how much would a sleazy tabloid (think National Enquirer) pay for Obama's phone records? What would they pay for a single phone number that was registered to someone that Mr. O should not be talking to? Be a hooker in Vegas or a low-level government employee in Saudi Arabia, such news would be incredibly valuable in the right hands. And nearly every single Verizon employee has access (although not legitimate) to this information.
Similar thinks happen in a hospital, but the occurrence is lower. With phone records you probably have something worth selling every month. So the real question is how long is it going to take before there is a real market for this kind of information? Can Verizon (or any carrier) fire every employee that accesses the information improperly? Maybe, but probably not.
I think we're just going to have to live with the new value of this information.
This was the first thing I thought of when I read the summary......
Just remember - if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.
Our healthcare organization has all sorts of protections against this.
The first is obviously education and awareness. We have annual training that talks about what people can and can't do.
We also have the ability to flag certain patients as "do not announce", which means that clinicians can't even mention folks are in the hospital. Furthermore, records can be marked as limited access, with only a few people being able to see them (this is rarely done, as preventing legitimate access is dangerous). What's more common is to "self-authorize" when accessing a patient you wouldn't normally see. They basically click a warning box and someone later reviews it.
I would think that for telecommunication companies, it would be relatively easy to maintain a list of high profile phone numbers. If anyone wants to access those, a message pops up asking "Are you sure? A manager will be notified." If they say yes and have a valid reason, there won't be a problem.
When Sarah Palin's personal email was compromised, she was enjoying the customary United States Secret Service protection extended to major candidates for 120 days before the election. As such, the Secret Service were all over the case as well as the FBI, and the fellow responsible was quickly identified and punished.
What's different about this case? Why is Verizon able to play this whole thing off as some minor internal thing that's no big deal really when Obama is such a high proile target?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
First, I believe that this whole situation, on multiple levels, is pretty messed up. I think when the Outrage, and Smirking, dies down, that the facts will most likely show that this was the act of a handful of people acting coy. And, for a short while, Obama's phone was our phone. But ignoring this article's implications, I think the tagging for this article should have been, "Warrentless, Wiretap, Felony, Stupid".
Never heard of him. You talk as though he was some kind of Super Star like Rajnikant.
There has been a lot of talk about "automating" our health care and records as part of a move to Universal health care. This example of employees improperly accessing phone records should be cautionary when we think about automating health care records. We need to have logs of all access to anyone's records. We need to have strong security models and patient notification of any and all access to records. And, we need to change the law so that the media *MUST* reveal the source of any information leaked from unauthorized records. I know the first amendment folks will cringe at any requirements of disclosure, but the press has no rights to access or publish this kind of information, especially when the government forces us to provide it.
Can you imagine a president that has a lot in common with your typical mis-profiled
US immigrant or citizen that slightly resembles a terrorist, and that their lives, phone records,
personal information were accessed without much worry of reprimand due to that new bill stating "we think your a terrorist, therefor we reserve the right to harass you".
Finally he gets a taste of what its like for many people in the US, and might actually do something about it. However, I think it might just be down played to a level of breach of security on the part
of Verizon, where they more so state "it was an act of vandalism, more so then a hate crime, or racially driven statement"
Oversight is OK though right? He has nothing to hide.
If he stops the NSA from spying on domestics then I'll take back my comment.
if you go into a wireless store and you give them your number they pull up your information to help you with your needs. So these people pull up peoples accounts everyday without having the customers in front on them to call them to help them with there bill or let them know about eligible upgrade. Whats the difference if you pull up this account from the average Joes account. I understand that some people just wanted to see even if this man had cell phone service through this company. It was stupid but hey everybody's human. Some of those people that might have come across that mans account are good normal people Americans and some might be bad people but Verizon should look into that and have some trust in there employees and remember Its Verizon Wireless is fault for having that information out there. Nobody should have access but one person who handles government accounts. So in perspective Verizon is to be blamed and not the men and woman who viewed this account because that's what these people do for a living. Yes some sort of disciplinary action should be taken but most of these people should not loose there jobs.
1. Clinton administration snagging secret FBI background checks on all the nation's leading Republicans.
2. Democrats illegally recording Newt Gingrich cell phone call and leaking it to the press.
3. Democrat breaking into Gov Palin's e-mail account and plastering the contents all over the web.
4. Hoards of Democrats in a bunch of state offices digging into every possible government record looking for dirt on Joe-the-plumber (the average citizen who dared question the messiah)
5. Both McCain and Obama having their passport records breached
6. The pregnancy of Palin's under-age daughter and details about her boyfriend being splashed all-over the papers.
7. Palin's minor daughter's cell phone info being leaked onto the web
Actually, I though of all the recent breaches by people in both parties, but there seems to be a fixation on Cheney/Bush, and a baseless presumption that Democrats value privacy, on the net that is a bit tiresome and some balance is required. The problem is NOT that the wrong people are in charge or the wrong people are the victims; the problem is that humans are corruptible and too much power in the hands of too few, with too little oversight, will always lead to trouble. No matter which side of the aisle you are on, eventually your people will be the victims and the other people will be the perps. Best that people on both sides hammer-out better rules to protect the privacy of everybody... while still protecting everybody from real harm. Anybody who only notices and gets upset when somebody in his political party is violated is somebody who does not truly care about privacy
For anyone who still thinks there could have possibly been a legitimate reason for this, think again. What's been confirmed to me is that roughly seven employees from a store in eastern Massachusetts (I know where, but there's no need to get THAT specific) were goofing around and were interested in Obama's records. They apparently didn't realize how seriously this would be taken. The (unconfirmed) rumor is that they were just bored at work, and someone thought it might be funny to look it up. They did not have any malicious intentions, but at the same time they had no legitimate reason to access the account. They are all suspended, and they will all be fired after the investigation confirms what the accused have already shared with other VZW employees. Don't worry about how I know, I just do.
It's important here to distinguish between "account records", "call records", and "trap & trace"...
It appears that the Verizon employees were checking out Obama's account records, which is basically viewing his name, address, payment info, rate plan, features, etc.
If they also viewed his call records, they could have garnered some information on the numbers he called, date & time of calls, general locations of the call origin & destination , and duration of the call. None of this would include the content of the call, but could still provide some interesting bits (depending on the level of detail in their call detail records). The same basic information could be viewed for text messages and data sessions, but again, not the content of those communications. This is the type of information available on your cellular bill, if you choose "detailed billing". This is still a major violation of CPNI rules, if they took it to this level, but that's not indicated in the articles I read.
Lastly, there is "trap & trace" or your typical wiretapping, where you can record the conversation and/or content of the communication. This is a much more involved effort and requires additional tools and training to perform. I would expect anyone caught doing this without authorization (other than the NSA) to be prosecuted. I seriously doubt that's what happened here.
You can just go read all the pro-invade Palin's email on the hopes she did something wrong crowd here at /. to reveal just how warped this place has become. The number who defended getting to the email of a mere candidate were astounding and was purely driving my political leaning.
Go to a left-leaning site and you'll find an astounding number of left-leaning idiots. Go to a right-leaning site and you'll find an astounding number of right-leaning idiots. The fact that you claim that this was purely driving your political leaning makes me suspect you're one of them as well.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Actually from Kennedy onward there was a practice in the white house of makeing tape recordings or other records of important calls. The most extreme example of this was Nixon who recorded everything. So you can at least get that info, a little late of course.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB48/nixon.html
Much of this information ends up in Presidential Libraries where it remains hidden for some time before being made public under the Presidential Records act.
Congress on the other hand, thats different.
The man is still a mere President-Elect, and you are already disappointed — not one new face so far, so much for the "Change we need". Hold that thought 'till 2012...
I'd be disappointed too, had I been among the 98% of Obama voters, who knew so little about the ticket they pushed into White House:
So, my disappointment is merely with the fellow Americans...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's called the Presidential Records Act.
(Ah, but what's this? An Executive Order from President George W. Bush? I wonder what that's about...)
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Looks like we need a phone anonomizing solution. Of course only Val Kilmer, terrorists, plumbers and presidents would want it.
Nullius in verba
Since Obama is the Messiah, I am sure he's had one on one's with God. Now we all can have his # and stop all this silly praying...
I, for one, will start praying via Text Message.
The MSM didn't get Barack Obama to the White House. George W. Bush and Sarah Palin did.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo