Verizon Wireless said late Thursday that a number of its employees accessed and viewed President-elect Barack Obama’s personal cell phone account.

The account, a company statement said, has been inactive for several months and the device associated with the account was a voice flip-phone not the President-elect Obama's now-famous BlackBerry smartphone.

CEO Lowell McAdam publicly apologized to President-elect Obama in the statement, saying the details of the breach are still being investigated.

“All employees who have accessed the account – whether authorized or not – have been put on immediate leave, with pay,” Mr. McAdam said in the statement. “As the circumstances of each individual employee’s access to the account are determined, the company will take appropriate actions.”

Verizon Wireless representatives declined to comment on the specifics of its rules regarding unauthorized employee access to customer data, and the possible penalties.

While the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has clear rules regarding the use of telephone company customer data, it is fairly mum on employee access to that data.

Telephone companies “may only release your customer information to you upon request with certain protections, such as a password if your request is by phone or online,”  FCC rules state.

These rules were clearly violated in the Hewlett-Packard “pretexting” case more than  two years ago, when HP used a data broker to trace the source of an internal leak. (HP: Dunn Wrong?)

More to the point are FCC rules governing the legal use of customer information without the permission of the customer. The phone company can use customer data without the permission of the customer only to market enhancements to services already in use. For everything else, the phone company needs customer approval.

There are some anecdotal FCC guidelines regarding civil penalties for violations, but enforcement is case by case at best.