Well, I had held off writing this post because I expected The Wicked Chairwoman, aka, Patricia C. Dunn to be fired yesterday or today…but instead of firing her ass, HP annonced that she’ll “step down in January”…in January??? Come on! And to make things even *more* fun, she’s just stepping down…that is, she will still be part of HP’s board of directors, just not its Chairwoman.
The New York Times (signing out your soul required) has been covering this story for the last few days, as has Groklaw, and even slashdot, as well as various blogs, including, of course, mine :)
One of the best overviews of the story up until friday is at Perilocity, a story with lots of quotes and links.
As I said, Groklaw has been covering the story too, first when the story started getting bigger and bigger (that post has been updated twice) and then another story where PJ does what we love her doing, analyzing the possible legal repercussions of the whole thing.
And the New York Times has been at it too, with at least 5 stories in the last few days, starting with Dunn’s efforts at trying not to become the scapegoat (scapegoat?? how the hell can you be the scapegoat of something you are guilty of?? I thought scapegoating involved innocence in some way). They also talk about how the California attorney general’s investigation has revealed that HP also targeted journalists. Talking about the journalists targeted, CNet News.com talks about the fact that the father of one of their journalists was also a target of the illegal investigation.
The NYT also has an email that lets you peek into the cesspool…err…the HP board’s discussions.
And then, in various newspapers we get to see that the US Congress and the US Attorney General has joined the party.
Then Slashdot points us to the story in Newsweek about Dunn, calling her “HP’s covergirl” :) And, probably the best post about this whole thing, Allan Wastler’s open letter to Dunn…a masterpiece :)
Oh, and Dan Farber also has a post about the whole thing, which is worth reading.
Yesterday, HP’s board was still pondering what to do with The Wicked Chairwoman, and today they finally decided, as the NYT and USNews.com point out.
I’m very disappointed on HP after all of this…and I really hope that the CA AG or US AG do something about it and start sticking idiots in jail. This kind of “investigation” is illegal *and* immoral, and should be stopped, hard.
Technorati Tags: hp leak, hewlett-packard leak, hp privacy violations, , hp legal problem, hp illegal investigation, pretexting, tom perkins, hp leak probe, hp pretexting
Tags: Thoughts
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Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 2:15 pm 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.
Is there a short layman’s version of what they did that was wrong? I’m gathering just by reading what you’ve written and not going to any links, that they got information from consumers dishonestly? When caught at it they investigated themselves and said to any outside investigator, “No no no we got it. It’s an internal matter and it’s under control.” Then gave a figurehead a slap on the wrist and grinned at each other at having gotten away with something?
Actually, no. What they did was an internal investigation using illegal means. There had been leaks of board meetings to the press for about a year now, and Dunn got fed up with it and hired a company to investigate all the board members and find out who the leak was. So far, so good.
The problem, tho, comes when they use pretexting as one of their methods of investigation. Pretexting is, in short, identity theft with the purpose of obtaining private information of the individual you are impersonating. That is, I call the phone company and tell them I’m Rich G. and want a copy of my phone calls record sent to my email addy.
It’s not currently known if Dunn authorized the investigators do use pretexting or if they did it on their own…but once the whole board knew, Tom Perkins, an investor and member of the board, told them that they *had* to own up to the mistake and tell the public and apologize to the *journalists* they had investigated, and the board decided not to do it…and Perkins resigned and blew the whistle…and that’s when people like me found out and got pissed off :)
I hope the story now makes sense to you.
It makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is if this happened in America why the employees whose rights were violated haven’t sued for huge compensatory damages as well as quit. The first is the American way, and the second would have been what I did first.
If an employee who has this happens to them stays I think they give up the right to bitch about it the second time don’t they? It’s obvious the people at the top are cads. It’s also obvious I won’t be buying any more HP stuff. *shrug* I can vote with my dollars, but that’s all I can do. Thanks for simplifying it for the unwashed me. :)
The employees that were investigated were all board members, so…they had a lot of money to lose. And the ones who weren’t employees were journalists and family of journalists, so they are getting back at them the best way they know how…by destroying them in the press.
As for staying…the guy that was the leak stayed for two months *after* he was asked for his resignation from the board…there’s indications that the leaks were orchestrated by some members of the board itself, so…this is getting weird lol! But no normal employees were under investigation, as far as it is known.