14 DAY TRIAL // Political-motivated security incidents seem to keep piling up this year, as Barack Obama's transition team announced a security breach involving the President-elect's cell phone records. The information appears to have been illegally accessed by employees from the Verizon Wireless cell phone operator.
Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director since 2004 and possibly the future White House press secretary, said that the phone whose records had been compromised had not been in use for several months. At the same time, he pointed out that, while phone numbers, call frequency and billing information might have been disclosed, "nobody was monitoring voicemail or anything like that."
The federal law enforcement agencies and the Secret Service have been notified of the incident, but according to Mr. Gibbs no criminal investigation has yet been opened. However, Verizon Wireless, the company who's mobile phone services Obama used, opened an internal investigation into the matter.
According to an internal memo obtained by CNN, the investigation has the purpose of revealing the number of employees that accessed the records, as well as their identity. Determining whether “the information of our customer had in any way been compromised outside our company,” is also a priority, the said memo, signed by Verizon Wireless CEO, Lowell McAdam, has informed.
The company's CEO has also made it clear that all employees found to have been snooping through the billing records for "anything other than legitimate business purposes will face disciplinary action, up to and including termination."
This new security breach surfaced after many other politically-related incidents made the headlines this year. Such was the case of Alaska Governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who had her personal e-mail hacked and its contents posted online. In addition, both campaigns of Obama and McCain had been the target of hackers, who successfully downloaded confidential data from their respective networks.
More recently, it was disclosed that the unclassified network of the White House has been compromised by Chinese attackers on various occasions, and that e-mail communications have been intercepted, while the Ohio Secretary of State website, which was used for voter registration, has been compromised after political tensions between democrats and republicans escalated.