HP Spying Indictments Expected
Several news outlets are reporting that the former chairwoman of Hewlett-Packard will be indicted by the State of California for her role in the rapidly unfolding spying scandal at the company. Also facing indictment are a former attorney for the company and three private investigators hired by H-P.
An interesting feature of this case as it unfolds has been the surprise with which the media and commentators greet revelations: (1) that a major company would go to such extreme and invasive measures to identify leakers and (2) that “pretexting” — essentially fooling the telephone company into releasing personal telephone records — is so easy. The apparent tactics of the private eyes caught up in this scandal criminal case are representative of a whole cottage industry of information-gathering that operates on the fringes of the law. The only surprise should be how infrequently they are exposed.
And today we learn that Patricia Dunn and four others have been charged with fraud and conspiracy. I’m not a criminal law expert, but I would have to think the fraud charge would be on some sort of accomplice / indirect liability – based on supervising, directing, or having responsibility for the questionable methods of the private investigators. (In terms of the investigators themselves, I think fraud charges are a “slam dunk,” though that phrase may have been retired.) Conspiracy, always the fall-back move for prosecutors, would seem to depend upon the underlying predicate offense for validity?
As former president Richard Nixon learned, trying to squash leakers can be a very dangerous undertaking. HP’s plumbers weren’t particularly competent either.
Update: To clarify, I meant the fraud charge for Dunn – for the investigators, as noted, it should be straightforward.
[...] You may find distasteful the notion of company snoops tailing employees and pressing their ears up against doors to hear “moans and sighs.” And to be sure, outside the workplace, employers have no greater leeway to spy than anybody else (as demonstrated by the Hewlett Packard spying scandal). But it sounds like the Wal-Mart cops stay within the law. And further line-drawing quickly becomes difficult. The Times article includes accounts of several instances where Wal-Mart investigators uncovered honest-to-goodness ethical problems, including a board member who diverted over half a million dollars to personal use (and eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges). In other areas of the law, notably sexual harassment, we are increasing our expectations of corporate knowledge about employees’ personal actions, some of them arguably within a private sphere. And judges have worried about the practicalities of prohibiting employers access to somewhat private areas such as desk drawers — what about when someone is out sick and colleagues need access to a file? [...]