You won't like the (ring) tone of this story

I had already read some reports indicating that your phone records could be purchased online by anyone with a credit card, but this report from AMERICAblog simply floored me. Apparently, for the bargain basement price of $89.95, John in DC purchased the cell phone records of General Wes Clark, author, former presidential candidate and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

All we needed was General Clark's cell phone number and our credit card, and 24 hours later we had one hundred calls the general made on his cell phone in November. The calls included a number of calls to Arkansas, to foreign countries, and at least one call to a prominent reporter at the Washington Post. To ensure that we actually had General Clark's correct cell phone number, we called the number this morning and the voice mail recording that answered said:

"Hi, this is Wes Clark, leave a message [unintelligible]."

We have retained a recording of that voice mail message.

This is clearly outrageous. But let me first say, as an aside, that I bought my own Cingular Wireless phone records this past weekend and reported on it on AMERICAblog. I wouldn't do this to any other public person without first doing it to myself. But even after reporting on this gross violation of my (and your) personal privacy, Congress, the Administration, and the phone companies have yet to act effectively. (And they have known about it since at least this past July when the Washington Post reported on it.) So we decided to attempt to buy the records of a celebrity, so to speak. And we unfortunately succeeded.

Outrageous barely begins to describe it. And this has been going on for quite some time, with Congress knowing about it since last summer at least. Click through the jump and you'll see a full printout of Clark's calls for a three day period in November. (With most of each phone number blacked out to protect his privacy.)

I'm more and more glad that I rarely talk on the phone except for business calls.