Everybody has been talking about the HP “internal investigation”, which the Attorney General of California, Bill Lockyer said violates two statutes, one protecting data and the other protecting privacy…and they will be prosecuted by his office.
Said illegal actions can be prosecuted as misdemeanors, which carry a maximum of one year in jail, or as a felony, which carries a maximum of three years in prison. The only problem, right now, is that they are not yet sure *who* is it that they’ll be going after, HP officials, board members, the investigative company or that company’s subcontractor.
There are a couple of quotes from Ryan Donovan, HP’s spokesman, that really sound hollow to me…and being as categorical as they are, if they are lies, they should not only get him fired, but should make him unable to get a job at that level ever again. The first quote:
HP’s Donovan said that at the time of the pretexting, “there were no
established laws in the U.S. prohibiting pretexting.”
Uhm…there may not have been any laws talking about pretexting itself as such…but Lockyer makes it clear that some or all the things that, together, are called “pretexting” *are* illegal. So…no, there are no laws against pretexting, but there *are* laws that protect that and that protect privacy, and pretexting *does* invade the privacy of the target and data that should only be accessible with the target’s permission. Did HP really didn’t know that? Did HP’s *lawyers* not know that? I have a hard time believing that.
The second quote, if proved false, is the most damning and the one that should get Donovan fired *and* jailed, IMNSHO.
Company spokesman Ryan Donovan said, “Perkins was asked if he was
leaving because of any disagreement with HP, and he indicated no. Based
on that, HP submitted the filing in May.”
There’s emails from Tom Perkins to Ann Baskins (ID’ed as HP’s head of the legal department by the Wall St. Journal) in which he says that he doesn’t agree with the minutes of the board meeting of May 18. He’s said to have stormed out from the last board meeting he attended, after a 90-minute heated discussion about the legality of the investigation…and HP didn’t think he left because of a disagreement with HP? Come on!
This case gets weirder and weirder with every new thing said by each of the sides…I just hope that the CA AG *does* press charges against whoever is responsible for this mess, and does it as a felony, and sticks them in jail for the mentioned 3 years…and I hope that every company out there learns this lesson.
The two Groklaw articles pointed at in the beginning of this post have links to even more coverage of this mess, worth reading, as usual PJ does a great job gathering information and asking the important questions.
Technorati Tags: hp legal problem, hp illegal investigation, pretexting, tom perkins, hp leak probe, hp pretexting scandal
Tags: Thoughts
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This entry was posted on Friday, September 8th, 2006 at 12:41 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] Well it seems hps spokesman Ryan Donovan is getting himself in trouble. The second quote, if proved false, is the most damning and the one that should get Donovan fired *and* jailed, IMNSHO. Company spokesman Ryan Donovan said, “Perkins was asked if he was leaving because of any disagreement with HP, and he indicated no. Based on that, HP submitted the filing in May.” [...]