“Talk about a nanny state,” the New York Post quips. “Goldman Sachs employees concerned Bloomberg news reporters are using terminals to snoop:”
Irked Goldman Sachs brass recently confronted Bloomberg LP over concerns reporters at the business news service have been using the company’s ubiquitous terminals to keep tabs on some employees of the Wall Street bank, The Post has learned.
The ability to spy on Bloomberg terminal users came to light recently when Goldman officials learned that at least one reporter at the news service had access to a wide array of information about customer usage, sources said.
In one instance, a Bloomberg reporter asked a Goldman executive if a partner at the bank had recently left the firm — noting casually that he hadn’t logged into his Bloomberg terminal in some time, sources added.
Goldman later learned that Bloomberg staffers could determine not only which of its employees had logged into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals but also how many times they had used particular functions, insiders said.
The matter raised serious concerns for the firm about how secure information exchanged through the terminals within the firm actually was — and if the privacy of their business strategy had been compromised.
“You can basically see how many times someone has looked up news stories or if they used their messaging functions,” said one Goldman insider.
“It made us think, ‘Well, what else does [Bloomberg] have access to?’”
“Mayor Bloomberg, who is worth about $25 billion, no longer oversees the day-to-day running of Bloomberg LP but controls the privately held company,” the Post adds.
Just to review the players involved, we have Goldman Sachs, the farm team for the White House’s economic advisors, being spied on by the information/publishing house of the Ultimate Nanny Stater, Mike Bloomberg. Whose news service is so in the tank for Obama, that seemingly every piece of bad economic news it reports is labeled “unexpectedly.”
Back in 2009, Kevin D. Williamson of National Review explored how the GOP lost Gordon Gekko, who apparently gave up the idea of corporate raiding for getting in bed with an administration whose dream was building a corporatist top-down command and control economy, and whose house organ declared in early 2009, “We Are All Socialists Now.”
The Zero Hedge econoblog adds, “to some there is nothing more informative than knowing if the object of their stalking ambitions is currently sitting next to a PC. As it turns out, it is not just clients of Bloomberg that found this functionality useful, but Bloomberg journalists too…”
As I said when the Washington Post’s JournoList scandal broke, you wanted it, you got it: Welcome to East Germany, boys. But, to mix socialist metaphors, didn’t you know that only the highest ranking Inner Party members have the ability to switch off their two-way telescreens?
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Update: “This is different from the News International phone hacking scandal, how?”
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