The excellent Lawyer Blogasm post--on the front page, you can't miss it--on corporate liabilities does skip over one quetiton, namely whether the record worth $1000 is the record of one customer, or the record of one telephone call. Many of us make more than one telephone call before changing numbers. In the latter case, all of the telemarketing firms are about to become so wealthy that they can retire.
More seriously, I will be checking --and urge you to do the same for your own pension funds etc--whether I was a stockholder in one of these firms, perhaps indirectly through a 401k or 403B or mutual fund. These firms appear in my opinion not to have disclosed potential risks that would affect their profits, starting with 'the situation is leaked, and we lose large numbers of customers to qwest.'
The virtue of starting with 'loss of customers' is in my opinion it does not matter whether the corporate actions were legal. MORE BELOW FOLD
There was a clear disclosable hazard, namely that customers would get upset, and so far as I can tell it was not disclosed to stockholders and investors. Furthermore, any reasonable person should have recognized that there was a significant likelihood that the log wiretaps would become widely known, and there was a reasonable likelihood that a reasonable number of customers would become annoyed.