And you thought just the Bush Administration was listening to your phone calls!
Turns out Hewlett Packard might be, too!
The story is that information was being leaked to the press that only members of the board of directors knew. So chairwoman Patricia Dunn took matters into her own hands. After all, Corporate America doesn't NEED to use FISA, right?
Dunn then took the extraordinary step of authorizing a team of independent electronic-security experts to spy on the January 2006 communications of the other 10 directors-not the records of calls (or e-mails) from HP itself, but the records of phone calls made from personal accounts. That meant calls from the directors' home and their private cell phones.
Just imagine. You work at a local big box store. Every week, you manage to get your hands on a copy of the following week's sales. You tell all your buddies to show up when the doors open. Management suspects something, but doesn't know who.
So they start hacking your PHONE and EMAIL?
Fortunately, maybe there ARE some repercussions.
Her actions were now about to unleash a round of boardroom fury at one of America's largest companies and a Silicon Valley icon. That corporate turmoil is now coming to light in documents obtained by NEWSWEEK that the Securities and Exchange Commission is currently deciding whether to make public.
Now we've always known some of our calls could be "monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes", even those of us who are nowhere near a customer. But these guys weren't "listening":
It was classic data-mining: Dunn's consultants weren't actually listening in on the calls-all they had to do was look for a pattern of contacts.
When Ms. Dunn found out who the snitch was, she pointed him out in a board meeting. And according to the story, only one member of the board, Tom Perkins, called her on her actions.
Perkins says he was enraged at the surveillance, which he called illegal, unethical and a misplaced corporate priority on Dunn's part.
..snip..
...Perkins says he was particularly annoyed since he chaired the HP board's Nominating and Governance Committee and had not been informed by Dunn of the surveillance, even though, he says, she had told him for months that she was attempting to discover the source of the leak.
Mr. Perkins couldn't reconcile himself to work in such an environment. GOOD FOR YOU, BUDDY!
After a divided board passed a motion asking the leaker to resign, Perkins closed his briefcase, announced his own resignation and walked out of the room. In media mentions the next day, Perkins's sudden resignation was noted, but without explanation and without any indication that his departure was a form of protest. (According to Perkins, the leaker-director himself refused to resign, saying it was up to shareholders to make such a decision; that director continues to serve on the board.) Thus began nearly four months of warfare between HP and Perkins about whether the surveillance would ever come to public light.
The SEC has to be notified regarding the departure of a board member. It also has to be told when the departure is a result of a disagreement over operational practices. But nobody said a peep about what happened to poor Perkins.
Good job! Make some noise, dude!
Oh, wait....who's your lawyer again...?
In early August, Perkins-represented by his own, non-HP lawyer, Viet Dinh, a former Bush administration official-formally asked the SEC to force HP to publicly file his written explanation for resigning.
The story takes yet another twist:
HP acknowledged in an internal e-mail sent from its outside counsel to Perkins that it got the paper trail it needed to link the director-leaker to CNET through a controversial practice called "pretexting"; NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of that e-mail.
Anyone know what pretexting is? I sure as hell didn't....
That practice, according to the Federal Trade Commission, involves using "false pretenses" to get another individual's personal nonpublic information: telephone records, bank and credit-card account numbers, Social Security number, and the like.
So all I have to do is call around with a little personal information, beg and plead to get the rest, and BINGO! I can sell it to the highest bidder.
I know my best friend's address, full name and date of birth. So I call the company I believe that provides her local phone service, pose as her, and ask that duplicate copies of her bills be sent to me.
Nice! And a major American corporation is doing this shit?
Perkins himself was pretexted as part of Dunn's leaker probe. In the materials he sent to the SEC, Perkins includes an August 11 letter from an attorney at AT&T spelling out to Perkins that he was a victim of pretexting in January 2006; Perkins had requested that AT&T examine whether he had been pretexted. The AT&T letter explains that the third-party pretexter who got details about Perkins's local home-telephone usage was able to provide the last four digits of Perkins's Social Security number and that was sufficient identification for AT&T. The impersonator then convinced an AT&T customer-service representative to send the details electronically to an e-mail account at yahoo.com that on its face had nothing to do with Perkins. Records for Perkins's home AT&T long-distance account in northern California were similarly obtained, except by someone using another yahoo.com e-mail account; both e-mail accounts are registered to the same Internet Protocol address, but for which AT&T says it does not know the identity of the user.
Well, even if Perkins IS represented by some Bush crony, at least he's after the goods...
Perkins says he has asked other government agencies to investigate the sub rosa surveillance of the HP directors. Those agencies include the California attorney general's office, as well as theFTC, the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department.
So watch it, kids. Don't talk smack because Big Corporate Brother might start keeping track of you, too.