election hangover

Obama’s Antiquated Cell Phone Breach!

Oh, he can hear you now, B.

As President-elect Obama comes to grips with the fact that he may very well be facing four or more years without a BlackBerry, here’s some news that might make it a bit easier for him to unplug: In an internal company e-mail sent on Wednesday, Verizon Wireless revealed that Obama’s wireless account had been “accessed by employees not authorized to do so.” Chilling! Or not, really? The account had been inactive for several months, so it’s just, like, shady.

Verizon claims that these rogue staffers were just looking at billing records and “nobody was monitoring voicemail or anything like that.” Good — that makes it easier to resist indulging our half-baked theory that the Verizon Guy is a spy for Hillary. It would’ve been a lonely tangent. So we guess this was just a matter of kindly Verizon employees volunteering for some non-campaign-finance monitoring? That’s nice of them to help keep track of the not-so-relevant books. But really, rather than get all indignant and paranoid about it, let’s be realistic about what probably happened: On some boring summer night in Boise, a few stoner employees probably went out for some beers after work — and dude, wouldn’t it be hilarious if they went back to the office right now and, like, looked up famous names on the billing computer? Just to see what comes up? Ha, yeah, let’s finish smoking this and then we’ll go screw around! Right.

Also worth mentioning: The wireless account in question was “a simple voice flip-phone” that couldn’t access e-mail or the Web. Aw! We remember our first StarTAC like it was just yesterday…

Obama’s Cell Phone Records Breached [CNN]

Obama’s Antiquated Cell Phone Breach!