A group of Verizon Wireless staff landed have in hot water after they were caught snooping their way through newly elected president of the United States, Barack Obama’s, phone bill to see who he was calling.

The security breach was spotted by Verizon, which has sent all of the staff involved home, until they can establish who was legitimately looking at the details for work reasons, and who was just being nosey. Here’s a hint – the people being nosey will likely be sacked.

The data that the staff were viewing came from a phone that he no longer uses, so there is no threat to Obama’s safety, but its only goes on to show how easily people could view his private information.

Verizon have been praised by the media for their quick action, and making it public.

This follows more phone related news about Obama. Earlier this week the president-elect was warned that by US law he may have to give up his beloved Blackberry.

The reason for this is that the Presidential Records Act states that the any correspondence from a president must be available to view for US citizens. This means that anything he wants to say digitally is right there for the public to see.

He might do what Clinton and Bush did and give up emails entirely, but Obama is a well known tech-nerd, so having him ditch the Blackberry could prove difficult.

A New York Times report said Obama could maybe keep it if he only received emails, and didn’t send them, but that’s a little bit sad, no?

Obama is keen to embrace the Web 2.0 scene, and even recently announced that presidential broadcasts would be held on YouTube. His presidential campaign involved the use of numerous social networking sites such as Twitter, Myspace and Facebook.