Good Work if You Can Get It

Verizon Wireless evidently is a good place to work.

The lucky ones end up in television commercials.

The rest? Well, they work in buildings in complexes scattered around the country, doing whatever they do to make certain their subscribers have cell service no matter what the locale.

Some, I guess, peruse their customers accounts.

A few with authorization and others without it.

Barack Obama’s account drew particular interest.

In a statement (issued on November 20, 2008), Verizon Wireless President and CEO Lowell McAdam apologized to Obama and disclosed the breach, saying: "a number of Verizon Wireless employees have, without authorization, accessed and viewed President-elect Barack Obama's personal cell phone account."
He said the account has been inactive for several months and Obama had been using a simple voice flip-phone without email capabilities.
"All employees who have accessed the account _ whether authorized or not _ have been put on immediate leave, with pay," McAdam said. "Employees with legitimate business needs for access will be returned to their positions, while employees who have accessed the account improperly and without legitimate business justification will face appropriate disciplinary action."

The next day an unspecified number of employees were fired

Two observations:

1. The initial punishment for this transgression? McAdam was so outraged that he put the employees in question “on immediate leave, with pay.” So, what does one need to do at Verizon to be fired? In recent months, hundreds of thousands of breadwinners have been put on something called indefinite leave (lay-off) without pay simply for doing their jobs in companies that could not afford them anymore. Each of them could have used time off with pay.

2. When the terminations were announced, the company said it had launched an internal investigation as to whether Obama’s records had only been shared among employees or whether the information had been compromised outside of the company. Now, that’s reassuring. It’s OK to internally share the phone records of the soon-to-be most powerful person in the world?

Oh, and in case you are wondering, Verizon “alerted the appropriate federal law enforcement agencies.” That would be the U.S. Department of Justice, that rock-solid impartial enforcer of laws. The same U.S. Department of Justice that fired politically recalcitrant U.S. Attorneys and screened applicants for internships based on their political preferences.

Fortunately for McAdam, the Department’s phone number was on speed dial. For years, you see, Verizon had shared its customers’ files with the Department without a warrant. No fumbling around with that bulky telephone directory.

All right. So, perhaps Obama is at least partially to blame. After all, last summer he voted to afford telecommunications industry, including Verizon, with retroactive immunity for their illegal snooping and illegal wiretaps. And, when McCain and Palin called him a terrorist, millions of Americans took them seriously, right?

So, is it possible the CSR’s with the GED’s who peeked may have thought that they were just been doing their patriotic duty for GW?

And, McAdam? The man whom Verizon paid over $18.0 million in 2007? And, who helped lobby for immunity for snooping?

He’s still got a job.