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Obama cell phone snoopers canned

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Verizon Wireless has fired employees who peeked at President-elect Barack Obama’s cell phone records, according to published reports. The staffers were sacked on Friday, an unidentified source told CNN, adding, "we now consider this matter closed.” It’s unknown how many employees were axed, or exactly what information they accessed, but the source says there's no way they listened to voice mails or read any text messages that Obama sent or received. But the staffers would have been able to see that voicemails were left in his account. Verizon is now investigating whether Obama’s information was shared outside of the company, CNN is reporting, citing an internal memo it obtained. Privacy experts say that disseminating information outside of an organization could violate the law. The snoopers’ jobs were to “take care of customers” and they weren’t allowed to look at client records unless customers told them to, the source told the news network. "This was some employees' idle curiosity," the source said. A Verizon spokesperson confirmed the CNN report but would not disclose any further details to ScientificAmerican.com. As we noted Friday, the snooping exposes a loophole in a federal law that protects the content of phone and data communications, but not records of the communications themselves. State laws on privacy vary, and companies have their own policies on what information is and is not fair game for employees’ prying eyes. The breach of Obama’s records is just the latest example of employees peeking at private information; Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s passport records were accessed earlier this year, as were the medical records of celebrities treated at UCLA Medical Center. Employees at the hospital and the State Department also were fired over those incidents. Image of Barack Obama by heartcorephotos via Flickr