Hewlett-Packard General Counsel Ann O. Baskins resigned today and told a
Congressional subcommittee investigating HP's boardroom leak scandal that
she would invoke her Fifth Amendment privilege and decline to testify at
today's hearing.
Baskins said
in a letter hand delivered to the House Energy and CommerceCommittee that
she believed that the company's use of deception to obtain private phone
records during its investigation was legal. The deception -- called ``pretexting''
-- had investigators impersonating HP board members, employees, reporters
and others to obtain their private phone records without their knowledge.
She also
submitted several documents, including a memo of an interview conducted by
Wilson Sonsini of former HP lawyer Kevin Hunsaker. In that memo, the lawyers
reported that Hunsaker told them HP had used pretexting in other, unrelated
investigations, including one involving a subject who was going through a
``messy'' divorce.
The
subcommittee hearing today revealed at least one HP investigator tried to
sound an alarm about the company's use of pretexting to obtain phone
records, but apparently got nowhere.
A document
released by the subcommittee showed that a member of the investigative team,
Vince Nye, sounded a warning in a Feb. 7, 2006 e-mail to HP security manager
Anthony Gentilucci.
`I have
serious reservations about what we are doing,'' Nye wrote in an e-mail to
Gentilucci. ``As I understand Ron's methodology in obtaining this phone
record information it leaves me with the opinion that it is very unethical
at the least and probably illegal. If it is not totally illegal, then it is
leaving HP in a position that could damage our reputation or worse.
The e-mail
continued, ``I am requesting that we cease this phone-number gathering
method immediately and discount any of its information. I think we need to
refocus our strategy and proceed on the high-ground course.''
The ``Ron''
referred to in Nye's e-mail was Ronald DeLia, head of a Boston-area private
investigation firm who worked for HP's investigation and declined to testify
today. Gentilucci resigned earlier this week as head of HP's global security
unit in Boston, and he also declined to testify.
As the hearing
opened, committee members expressed their disbelief that nobody at HP
stepped forward to say the practice, legal or not, was unethical and should
be stopped. Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich, called the HP actions ``a plumbers'
operation that would make Richard Nixon blush, were he still alive,''
referring to the 1970s Watergate break-in scandal that brought down the
Nixon presidency.
``The cure, in
this case, appears to have been far worse than the disease, and now poses a
far greater threat to Hewlett-Packard,'' Dingell said.
Since HP
disclosed earlier this month it had hired outside investigators that used
pretexting to trace boardroom leaks to reporters, the company has faced a
public furor resulting in the resignation of its board chairman on Friday.
The disclosure has triggered two criminal investigations and the
congressional hearing today.
Several
committee members used the opportunity to make another pitch for anti-pretexting
legislation it sent to Congress in May, but which, as committee member Diana
Degette, D-Colo., said seemed to have ``fallen down a black hole.'' Jan
Schakowsky, D-Ill, said HP was invited to testify in July on how to raise
the bar on protecting privacy. ``Little did we know that Hewlett-Packard had
been engaging in the worst practices out there,'' she said.
Although
Baskins did not testify, she gave the committee several documents backing up
her claim to have repeatedly confirmed, through an HP lawyer, the legality
of the methods used by HP investigators to obtain phone records of board
members, HP employees and reporters.
In one
document, former senior HP lawyer Hunsaker explained the process used by an
outside private investigator, Ronald DeLia, of Boston-based Security
Outsourcing Solutions.
``We provide
DeLia the names and telephone numbers we are interested in, he passes the
information to the third-party company, and they then make the pretext calls
to the phone service providers,'' Hunsaker wrote to Baskins on May 1.
Hunsaker
added, ``It should be noted that this is a common investigative tool that
has been used by professional investigators and law firms for more than 20
years -- this fact was confirmed by discussing the issue with a number of
experts in the field.''
Hunsaker,
referring to himself in the third person in the memo, said he had taken a
number of steps to confirm the legality of the practice of pretexting, which
involves an investigator posing as the target of an investigation to obtain
access to the target's private phone records.
He said he was
``confident'' that all phone records information obtained by HP's
investigators were obtained ``in a lawful manner.''
Memos
describing interviews with Hunsaker by Wilson Sonsini lawyers revealed the
law firm's own investigation of the HP leak probe in August. It said that
Hunsaker told them he had done ``hundreds of investigations'' but that this
was the first one to involve the use of pretexting. He said he first learned
about pretexting one or two years ago in connection with another HP
investigation.
Hunsaker told
Wilson Sonsini attorneys in an interview in August that he first learned HP
had used pretexting to obtain phone records in July 2005 in connection with
an unrelated HP investigation. A subject of that investigation ``was going
through a messy divorce, and his attorney contacted HP and claimed that HP
had changed his client's pin number in order to access his voice mail.
Hunsaker's team told them they had not altered the subject's pin or voice
mail, but had used pretexting to obtain phone information about the
subject.''
The memo also
described how Hunsaker obtained reporters' phone numbers from HP's media
relations department and gave them to DeLia.
Asked about
his research into the legality of pretexting, Hunsaker said ``that he did
about an hour's worth of online research.''
The same
document describes how Hunsaker had the hard drives of every member of HP's
executive council ``imaged'' as part of the investigation.
A month into
the investigation, Dunn and Baskins asked Hunsaker to reconfirm the legality
of the phone pretexting. The answer appears to have always been the same: it
was legal.
California
Attorney General Bill Lockyer has launched a criminal investigation of HP's
investigative pretexting, saying several California laws make the practice
illegal.
The
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on
Energy and Commerce has been investigating the broader use of pretexting in
hearings this year. Because the practice of pretexting is a focus of the
hearings, several HP executives and private eyes involved in its leak
investigation were invited to testify today.
Several
wireless industry executives and government regulators have been invited to
speak before the committee about pretexting Friday. |