Washington – The corporate spying scandal at Hewlett- Packard was so shocking that lawmakers had trouble even describing it as they grilled company executives Thursday.
“As I reviewed all of the documents for this hearing today, I felt like I was looking at a proposal for a made-for-TV movie,” said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., at the start of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing into HP’s use of “pretexting” to get phone records.
On the contrary, said Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., HP’s wrongdoing “unfolded like the plot of a third-rate detective novel.”
Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., said, “The evidence we’ve seen shows that this investigation is part Keystone Kops, it’s part ‘Mission: Impossible’ and perhaps part of ‘All the President’s Men’ all tied together,” he proposed.
It reminded Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., of the television comedy “Hogan’s Heroes.”
“HP may be suffering from Sgt. Schultz syndrome,” he diagnosed, referring to the guard at a German prisoner-of-war camp remembered for the refrain “I know noth-ing!”
When it comes to technology, Congress is frequently a mouse click behind the times.
Not long ago, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, sagely declared that the Internet is “not a truck; it’s a series of tubes.”
The difficulty grappling with technology surfaced more than once Thursday.
As they probed HP in the Rayburn Building, lawmakers argued among themselves about whether pretexting – using a phony identity to gain access to personal records – is actually illegal.
Or, as Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, put it: “Pretexting is pretending to be somebody you’re not, to get something you probably shouldn’t have, to use in a way that’s probably wrong.”
Next door in the Longworth Building, the House Administration Committee assembled to watch a Princeton computer scientist hack into electronic voting machines, the same machines counties nationwide spent billions on to satisfy new standards imposed by Congress. Edward Felten demonstrated how, by dipping a virus-tainted voting card into a Diebold voting machine, he could reverse results in a theoretical election.
