One of Fiorina's boardroom buds.
Posted on 09/08/2006 8:00:10 AM PDT by Liz
In an secret attack on reporters in an attempt to find their sources, Hewlett-Packard's private eyes tapped into personal telephone records of journalists who had exposed the company's boardroom bickering and business weak spots..... the Hewlett-Packard officer who hired the private eyes - Chairwoman Patricia Dunn - was herself a former journalist whose rising paranoia over leaks to the media about her company's woes became an obsession that has dragged H-P into a far-reaching criminal probe.
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer yesterday said laws were broken in the spying scandal and that charges are likely to be bought.......main target of H-P's snooping on reporters was Dawn Kawamoto, a business reporter for CNET News.com. She originally broke a story nine months ago about a secret board meeting at a posh spa..........Dunn, who felt she was betrayed by the meeting, ordered a probe of the leaks several months ago, involving hackers who pried into personal phone records of company directors. Lockyer's office said phone records of an undetermined number of other journalists also had been hacked.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
ping
Procter & Gamble did this back in the 80's with a WSJ reporter. (Read all about such tactics in "Soap Opera"). The difference between that incident and this is that P&G used the city police to do their investigation for them.
HP will regret it. I mean for real. Not just the PR reply.
It certainly sounds like the corporate culture did not improve after Carly Fiorina was ousted back in '05.
They should have stuck to making test equipment, They were a leader in that market, Now.....
I cannot imagine how anyone involved in this could have thought it was legal. Also can't imagine how anyone could have thought this spying was going to stay secret. You mix hubris and stupidity and it usually results in a ticket to the big house.
Under existing US law, employees have very little right to privacy when using company property. The same does not hold true in the EU, where employees' correspondence cannot be examined casually.
Even so---if they were company-paid, the PR fallout of corporate spying is horrendous---heads will roll.
I would be curious to know more about the details of the phone records examined. A phone call is a two-way communication. A reporter could claim he/she is being spied on if they were a party to a communication with an HP employee who's phone records were being examined.
HP's printers spy on their users all the time- Why shouldn't they do it at home,among themselves, too?
From a PC World Story:
Updates From HP takes this to new lows.
Its FAQ notes that security programs may try to block it, since it "phones home" for info.
The privacy policy says the program sends a bit of nonpersonal data (which isn't shared with third parties) back to HP.
On the PC I tried, it followed the ad with a pop-up noting "Important information about upgrading to SP2."
The pop-up links to a Web page that explains how to keep Updates From HP running when Windows XP Service Pack 2's firewall tries to whack the program's Internet access.
Then the page attempts to sell you broadband, two Symantec products, and memory that it vaguely insinuates SP2 might need.
Typical of a left wing controlled organization.
They love bad news and fabricated news about the rest of us.
Then when someone reports their reality, they turn neo fascist. This is very similiar to the Clintoons and the Rats in Congress trying to force ABC to change or cancel its upcoming 911 movie.
Nice, very nice, take.
Course, they don't "think" of themselves as neo-fascists---and I use the term "think" loosely when referencing liberals.
In the last analysis, this was about Dunn and her survival. The old Me-Myself-and-I gambit.
Mmmmmmm....right. Two-way. Who was being spied on?
The HP Way left with Test & Measurement.
As such, most BOD's are not employees of the companies boards that they serve on; they are brought in from outside agencies, etc to give oversight and direction.
This is a big deal.
One of Fiorina's boardroom buds.
Surely there will be heavy protest from the Left who are defending journalists and other Americans who communicate directly with Al Qaeda.
Of course.......LOL.
H-P was once great. The pain of its fall gets greater and greater.
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