Verizon wireless has fired employees who looked through President-elect Barack Obama’s old cell phone accounts without authorization.

The breached records were from Obama’s old flip phone, which had not been used for several months, not his BlackBerry or other email-enabled smartphone.

Verizon reported the breach on Thursday, when its CEO Lowell McAdam wrote a public apology to Obama for the incident, and said that all employees who had accessed (with or without authorization) the phone records were put on immediate leave without pay until the precise offending employees could be found.

An Obama aide told press that the employees had looked up the information out of “idle curiosity” and could not have accessed customer records without the specific request of the customer, and therefore could have only seen billing information and a call log. They could not have seen the content of the text messages or voice mails.

Monday, following the security breach, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt) sent a letter to the Justice Department inquiring how many investigations or prosecutions the department has made for violations of the Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act.

The senator, concerned by "data privacy breaches involving the sensitive phone records of ordinary Americans are occurring with greater frequency," sent the letter to acting assistant attorney general Matthew Friedrich, in order to assess how effective the act (which Leahy sponsored) had been since it was passed in 2007.

The act prohibits carriers from obtaining confidential phone records from customer accounts through the internet without permission. In light of the Obama records break-in, Leahy wants to know if Americans’ privacy is being protected.