FreshPhoneNews.com

Curiosity not only killed the cat, it can also kill the job. Employees at Verizon Wireless found this out the hard way. The carrier has just announced that it will be firing some of its employees for, get ready, accessing President Barack Obama’s phone records.

The press release was made Thursday that a number of Verizon’s employees were caught going through Obama’s phone records. Rumors are the mobile account was for a flip phone, a Motorola RAZR that had been inactive for several months. The records that were breached include call times, phone numbers of incoming/outgoing calls, numbers of text messages sent/received, etc. But the employees didn’t have access to the content of the email, text messages or voice messages.

Verizon had initially placed the employees who made the breach on leave while it conducted investigations. On Friday, however, the formal announcement was made that the matter was now publically closed and the relevant federal law authorities had been notified. Last but not least, the announcement told that the offending employees had been fired. Current investigations are aiming to find out if the employees shared the information only within Verizon, or was the information passed on to third parties. Needless to say Verizon will have to dole out a nice briefing and remind its staff a new of how important it is to respect user’s privacy. At this point, I really hate to think of all the complaints that are so common about Verizon on sheer service and packages, the company certainly didn’t need this as a holiday press release. Ah well, thumbs up for taking action so fast!