Verizon internal affairs investigation re Obama snooping leads to firings

It turns out that Verizon is tough on employees who break the law. Compare this story to the Sheriff of Santa Barbara, who is protecting a deputy who criminally abused his snooping privileges, and a commander who covered up for the deputy.


Verizon fires workers who snooped on Obama cell records
ZD Net Government
by Richard Koman
November 23, 2008
Red-faced Verizon Wireless has fired an undisclosed number of employees who couldn’t resist the chance to peek into Barack Obama’s cellphone records, CNN reports.

It was an old, flip-top phone, not his famous BlackBerry, and the account had been inactive for months. No text messages or voicemail contents could have been accessed. The employees were satisfying “idle curiosity,” a source told CNN, and the employees were not authorized to access customer records.

Verizon said, in an internal memo, that it has launched an internal investigation into whether the records “of our customer had in any way been compromised outside our company, and this investigation continues.”

The company has also notified federal law enforcement agencies.

While this appears to be little more than a case of bad behavior, it does highlight again the issue of telecom spying –and sharing with the NSA – on customer data. Obama supported legislation giving telecom companies immunity from lawsuits for such transfers.

Sheriff Bill Brown, won't you please ask Commander Sam Gross to cough up these records?

Photo Sheriff Bill Brown of Santa Barbara

Eleven days ago, I talked to Commander Sam Gross of the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department, on November 3, 2008. He said he would accept mail service of
my subpoena for documents, but added "that doesn't mean that we'll honor the subpoena."

No, apparently not.

And it turns out that the Santa Barbara sheriff is also pretending that it didn't receive the subpoena. Today I was told that Sam Gross is not available, and the records supervisor is not available, and nobody knows when the records supervisor will be available, and the supervisor does not have an assistant who could answer the simple question: "Did you receive the subpoena?"

I was told to fax the subpoena, but the fax wouldn't go through.

I'm starting to get the feeling that the Sheriff of Santa Barbara doesn't want me to have these documents. Hmmm. Is it possible that this is the reason he wants to keep those documents hidden?