Questions For The DOJ and FBI In The Bloomberg Spying Scandal

From a comment in an earlier post:

Were any civil laws broken with the unauthorized surveillance?

Did this activity violate any wiretap laws?

Were any criminal laws violated?

Was the information gathered for the use of insider traders?

How long has this unauthorized surveillance taken place?

Who knew about this surveillance using the Bloomberg monitors?

Is their a culture of illegal snooping taken place at Bloomberg ?

What other unauthorized surveillance capabilities does Bloomberg news have at its disposal?

Have any records or documents been destroyed?

Is Bloomberg like Murdoch unfit to manage a major corporation?

Were any financial losses incurred by those who were spied upon?

And from another commenter:

Federal Wiretap Laws prohibit the interception of voice, wire or electronic communications. There are criminal penalties for wiretapping that is not authorized by a court order. It seems that the Bloomberg employee surveillance falls within the purview of Federal wiretap laws since the Bloomberg employees were engaged in the unauthorized interception of electronic/wire data and communications.

More clients are asking questions about what Bloomberg reporters were doing:

With new concerns emerging about practices at its news division, Bloomberg L.P., the sprawling financial services company founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, scrambled to shield its lucrative terminal business and appease nervous customers.

The report on Friday that a Bloomberg reporter had used the company's financial data terminals to monitor a Goldman Sachs partner's logon activity has set off a ripple effect of inquiries from other worried subscribers, including JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and the European Central Bank.

The revelations now stretch back to 2011, when UBS complained after a Bloomberg Television host alluded on air to his monitoring of the London-based rogue UBS trader Kweku Adoboli's terminal logon information to confirm his employment status at the bank. Then, last summer, executives at JPMorgan Chase questioned Bloomberg reporters' techniques after they were among the first to report on the trader Bruno Iksil, nicknamed the London Whale. ''I'm unaware of any record of a complaint from either bank on this issue,'' said Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman. The fallout continued on Monday. Bloomberg has now received roughly 20 inquiries about whether reporting practices violated the company's policies about getting access to subscriber information, including one from Bank of America. The bank also contacted Bloomberg to raise questions about the security of its employees' private information, people briefed on the matter said.

CNBC reports Bloomberg may have some legal problems over this:

The company also began to discuss possible legal ramifications. While people close to the company doubted that clients would threaten legal action, Bloomberg hired outside lawyers on Friday to steer it through the crisis. The lawyers, according to the people close to the company, have assured Bloomberg that there is no basis for a lawsuit, since the subscribers did not suffer any damages and the information obtained was more trivial than confidential. An early analysis conducted by Bloomberg further suggested that reporters rarely, if ever, published stories based solely on information gleaned from the terminals.

The people close to the company also noted that Bloomberg's sales agreement with subscribers disclosed that company employees had access to certain private information. While the agreement did not specify that Bloomberg News reporters were among those with access, the journalists are technically employees of Bloomberg L.P.

But some bank executives said the snooping could have violated a common confidentiality clause in their contracts with Bloomberg. In the clause, Bloomberg promises to keep large swaths of information ''in confidence,'' meaning that it won't be shared with ''third parties.''

One Wall Street executive, who asked not to be named because of a firm policy prohibiting employees from speaking to the media, said his company was involved in a sensitive situation last year and he now wondered if reporters were monitoring his activities.

''Looking to see who is in or not is sleazy but hardly earthshaking,'' he said. ''But if they knew what stocks I was clicking on and what yields I was looking at, that is spying.'' (Bloomberg officials have repeatedly said the functions used by reporters did not provide information on specific trades or securities.)

Another top Wall Street executive, who also asked not to be named, said although he did not know if his firm would take action, he planned to raise this issue with his board. ''I don't like it when something happens that hasn't occurred to me, and this had not occurred to me,'' he said. ''I feel violated.''

Of course the Obama DOJ may not be able to investigate the Bloomberg spying allegations because they are too busy spying on journalists themselves, as the Associated Press alleges.