Verizon Wireless has eventually fired an undisclosed number of employees after they gained unauthorized access and viewed President-elect Barack Obama's old cell phone accounts, according to CNN. Verizon Wireless admitted last Thursday that several of its employees broke company rules by accessing and viewing President-elect Barack Obama's personal cell phone account. The company’s president and CEO Lowell McAdam apologized to the President explaining that the account had been inactive for several months and that it was a voice flip phone, rather than a smartphone with e-mail and other data.

Nevertheless Verizon declined to answer questions today, but a company spokesman said he "would not disagree with the CNN story." However reports indicate that the suspended Verizon employees had access to a relatively limited amount of data, including a record of phone numbers, call length, and timestamps.

When pressed for further details on what was accessed, however, Verizon Jeffrey Nelson declined additional comment. But it appears that despite low risks, Verizon Wireless is continuing an investigation into whether any information was shared outside the company.

The Verizon incident underscores the privacy and security concerns that are the reasons it may be hard for Obama to keep his
omnipresent BlackBerry after January 20. However, every CEO has security issues. "Every company has a lot of information assets and a lot of data records. But companies don't have the right business process to track who has access to what," said Deepak Taneja, president and CTO of security company Aveksa.

The snoopers’ jobs were to “take care of customers” only 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," a source said. Nevertheless McAdam also said in the e-mail that Verizon had already contacted appropriate federal law enforcement authorities regarding the breach.