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Vodafone Australia Employee Searched Journalist's Phone Records To Find Source
An anonymous reader writes: In 2011, a journalist named Natalie O'Brien published a series of stories on security problems in Vodafone's Siebel data system. "Customers' home addresses, driver's licenses and credit card details were all available online, O'Brien wrote, and criminal groups were paying for customers' private information." Now, Vodafone Australia has admitted that an employee went through her phone and text records to try and figure out who her sources were within the company. O'Brien wrote, "The invasion of privacy is devastating. It plays with your mind. What was in those texts? Who were they to? What did they see? What did they do with the information?" Despite the admission, Vodafone has denied that it engaged in improper behavior (PDF). The company says it found no evidence the employee was directed to do so by management. That said, leaked emails show management became aware of the privacy breach and its potential repercussions as early as 2012.
Its not uncommon to have middle management or even upper management that get a little overzealous with the amount of power they wield.
Working for a hosting company, I once had a manager that was absolutely furious that we hosted a domain that endorsed abortions and facilitated service provider interactivity. my manager didnt have access to the accounts database, but she knew members of her team surely did. She wanted log summaries of people who visited, which is a request that has to go through InfoSec. Once they denied it based on lack of a warrant, she started trolling the team for info during lunch. The fact that we dont obsess over every single site, let alone her problem child, seemed to make her upset. She submitted 3 requests for content review by the abuse department, and finally quit when their manager kept sending the original report back. She hit all of us up for accounts information for the user, and even tried logging in as the tape backup administrator after finding their username in some documentation. She was eventually fired after trying to tie our performance raises for the account information.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You can never really protect against these kinds of invasions of privacy, in particular by telecoms or governments.
Professional journalists should be using "burner phones" for this. That's their job as professionals, even if some countries (I guess Australia among them) make this difficult.
People should also protest against legal requirements for registering their phones with the government.