The first reports of Patricia and Mark’s Excellent Adventures at the House Energy and Commerce Committee are now in and the overall impression is one of sonorous bloviation by the pol’s and no surprises from HP.
Dunn didn’t supervise anything, told the Board about everything, assumed everything was aboveboard, had no idea what was going on below and didn’t ask, saw the word “pretexting” used in memos but assumed it was accepted and legal practice. Hurd missed warning flags, internal controls broke down and the investigation went rogue. He bears ultimate responsibility – indeed the “buck stops” with him – but like everyone else with whom the buck stops, it actually stops a few rungs below. By all accounts, Hurd’s presentation was contrition theatre, and went over well with committee members.
One is left with the distinct impression of senior executives who made a concerted and skilled effort to keep what they thought was a tawdry and must have suspected was an improper and possibly illegal investigation at arms’ length – an effort that is turning out to have been just enough to save them, toast a few others, and have more or less no effect on the stock price. Indeed, one of the stranger moments of the day was Larry Sonsini telling Committee members that the law isn’t as clear as it needs to be (if you had made the law clearer, we wouldn’t have been seduced into such improper behaviour – ?). Yes, perhaps, but lecturing on the law when most people wonder at the lack of moral compass is, to many, besides the point.
Perhaps the closest the Committee came to news was noted by CNet:
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Oregon, presented Dunn with an e-mail from the day earlier in which Dunn asks DeLia to reschedule a meeting to June 15 so Baskins could be included. In earlier testimony, before Walden presented the e-mail, Dunn said, “I do not recall being in that meeting.”
On further questioning, Dunn said that she may have seen the word pretexting, but didn’t know it equated to fraudulent misrepresentation. “The word pretext does show up in documents I had seen,” Dunn said.
Walden repeatedly asked Dunn how she thought HP was getting the phone records. “My understanding was these records were publicly available,” she said, later adding, “I understood that you could call up and get phone records” because she thought it was a common investigative technique.
Walden expressed skepticism, asking Dunn if she really believed that. “I thought a year ago, I thought six months ago, that indeed you could,” she said.
“You’re serious?” Walden said. “I’m not being funny here. You honestly believed it was that simple?”
He also presented Dunn with documents from a later Wilson Sonsini inquiry that had DeLia and others saying that Dunn was aware of the techniques being used. Dunn said the word “pretexting” may have been used, but that she did not understand that meant fraudulent misrepresentation.
“No one ever described to me that the fraudulent use of identity was part of the HP way of conducting investigations,” Dunn said.
Dunn, who is apparently unfamiliar with the literal meaning of the word “pretext”, happily did not spend too much time at HP waiting for someone to describe to her “that the fraudulent use of identity was part of the HP way of conducting investigations”; but it’s certainly nice to know now that waiting for this kind of warning was her standard for supervision.
Update: The NYT rounds out the day’s coverage by turning the HP investigation report into a cross between a psychodrama and a whodunnit.
In doing research on this story, I read some of the message boards where private investigators hang out. The sense I get from them is that they know, at the very least, that no one outside of their field should have access to these phone records. I’m not sure if that’s because they want to keep the advantages of a guild (only we can do this), because they know that attention makes it harder for them to get information this way, or because they suspect that it’s wrong or illegal, but it’s their bread and butter.
Certainly, Action Research, the subcontractor DiLea used, goes to some effort to have its cake and eat it too. They talk about getting data that’s “100% current” and “not in any database.” They say they specialize in “telephone research,” but they’re very careful not to say exactly what it is that they do. They’re not the only ones, either.
When I see a profession almost universally reluctant to talk about what they do, or using code words instead of just straight-out saying something, that raises a red flag.
Interesting point, Patrick. The obvious question, then is why was his counsel apparently telling HP that pretexting is legal? How very strange.
Glenn, I just would have no idea. That’s an awfully sad thought. But Larry Sonsini is also saying that he didn’t make a connection between pretexting and impropriety. And Ann Baskins declined to do her own due diligence after she knew that pretexting was involved. I’m inclined to think that all of them looked the other way after their subordinates told them it was OK – subordinates who they knew, of course, were under a lot of pressure to say so.
Glenn, that’s a really good observation about chemotherapy, and one I haven’t heard elsewhere. One of the things I’ve noticed about this story is how shallow the general reporting is. Sure, the Congressional hearing is dramatic, but until recently I haven’t seen much reporting on the deeper issues of how and why this happened.
There’s a narrative here that connects the desires of all the parties to make HP strong, combined with their individual interests and conflicts, that is as rich as Macbeth.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned directly is that Dunn has gone through a few bouts of cancer and treatment. As someone who himself has gone through cancer treatment (almost a decade ago), I can testify that your brain doesn’t work the same way during nor after. I was mostly back to normal a few months after chemo, but I lost some memory and I’m not precisely the same person I was before it. This varies by person.
She has said in some interviews that the cancer hadn’t affected her ability to function as an executive. But when I read this nonsense about her not knowing that obtaining phone records would involve anything but publicly available information, I would prefer to think that cancer treatment caused a woman widely thought to be savvy and ethical to cut corners. The other alternative is that she’s not as smart and nowhere near as ethical as she was long trumpeted.
(This fellow Patrick Tufts is making the rounds pointing that fact out about the PI — good research on his part coupled with good Technorati work.)
The irony is that the PI Dunn used for the pretexting wrote in 1999 that using someone’s social security number to impersonate them is “identity theft,” and “Congress made identity theft a felony [in 1999].”
http://ptufts.blogspot.com/2006/09/massachusetts-pi-linked-to-hps.html