The Google thread I started in GD got me thinking: with the right access, a Google employee could find out enough about the lives of powerful (or even average) people to become a modern day Charles Augustus Milverton (Sherlock Holmes, by the way), collect awesome amounts of money and power (assuming this person was tech savvy and smart enough not to get caught, but that’s outside the purview of this post). Obviously, potential victims wouldn’t use Google for the REALLY bad stuff, so I’d also like to consider ISPs in this question.
How easy would doing so be? Who has the kind of access necessary? I assume that there’s a system set up to set off red flags for below a certain level of employee, not to mention internal logs, but could it be done by anyone but the CEO or similar level?