San Francisco – Hewlett-Packard Co.’s chief ethics officer learned the company’s detectives were relying on shady tactics to gather private phone records long before a boardroom battle over media leaks triggered criminal and congressional investigations into the privacy intrusions.
The latest evidence about HP’s internal knowledge of its contractors’ subterfuge emerged in excerpts from e-mails and other documents published Wednesday in The New York Times.
The leaked documents are likely to raise more questions about whether HP management simply looked the other way while detectives hired by the company pried loose the private phone records of its directors and at least 12 other people by using a bit of misrepresentation known as “pretexting.”
To help them fool the phone companies, HP’s detectives obtained and then used the targeted individuals’ Social Security numbers.
The pretexting piece of the covert operation is now under investigation by state and federal authorities. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer already has declared he has enough evidence to indict people inside and outside HP.
A congressional panel has scheduled a Sept. 28 hearing that will include testimony from HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn, who authorized the company’s pretexting probe to plug a boardroom leak but has said she didn’t realize the detectives were going to such extremes until recently.
As a result of the scandal, Dunn will give up the top job in January.
But Kevin T. Hunsaker, HP’s chief ethics officer, expressed his concerns about the legality of the investigators’ methods in a Jan. 30 e-mail to Anthony R. Gentilucci, who manages the company’s global investigations unit in Boston, according to The Times.
The Palo Alto-based company’s efforts to plug its initial boardroom leaks has opened the floodgates on another round of media leaks that have made HP look more like a paranoid relic from the Watergate era than a high-tech innovator.
At one point in its boardroom investigation, HP drew up plans to plant spies in the San Francisco offices of The Wall Street Journal and Cnet, an online technology news site, according to documents provided to The Times. The operatives would have posed as clerks or cleaning crews.
It’s unclear whether HP ever actually tried to infiltrate the Journal or Cnet.
