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René Obermann, the chief executive of Deutsche Telekom, threatens “serious consequences” for any of its executives involved in an extraordinary surveillance operation aimed at plugging leaks from the boardroom to business journalists…
The affair came to light when the consultancy sent a fax to DT complaining of unpaid bills for the surveillance work, dubbed “Operation Clipper”. The operation may yet clip Mr Obermann’s wings: business reporters were busily calling each other yesterday to check which colleagues had figured in the phone records, whether they should now change phone company – and whether there was any significance in the fact that the monitoring ended soon after Mr Obermann achieved his aim of taking over DT…
Hendrik Zoerner, of the German Journalists’ Federation, said: “We have never experienced such a blatant breach of confidentiality before.” Mr Ricke has admitted that he was concerned about leaks – “Telekom was as full of holes as a Swiss cheese,” he told Der Spiegel – but he denies ordering the monitoring.
The snooping carried on through a couple of administrations at DT. And doesn’t this smell like HP?
Well, the good thing is that they were spying on each other instead of us. I think our friends at AT&T could learn something from that.