I didn't see anything on the diary list about this, and I'll delete if there's a similar diary already - but John Aravosis over at
AMERICAblog just got the results of his purchase of
Gen. Wesley Clark's cell phone records! (Link to post
here)
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.
Of course, John took the steps of censoring all but the last two digits of phone numbers, and any other relevant info to the purchase. This still allows Clark and a Washington Post reporter to confirm that these records are legitimate. This may prove to be far more effective than the reactionary "Let's get DeLay's/Abramoff's/any corrupt bastard's phone records!", as it won't be seen as the "partisan attack" that everything the Democrats do seems to be.
What's unclear at this point is exactly how Clark will react, as John doesn't seem to have run it by him first, or notified anyone of interest (WesPAC comes to mind...). At any rate, I only hope that this isn't taken offensively, and that the good General decides he should lend us a hand in taking care of an obvious lapse in privacy.
Perhaps now, we will see some real action on this measure, as opposed to a blind eye being turned to a significant issue by the government and the media!
UPDATE 1: member thisisnotanexit made light in the comments that MoveOn.org has already created a petition to make this type of activity illegal. Head over and sign it, if you care to!