Comments on: The HP Saga: The Buck Stops Where?

By: Patrick Tufts

Patrick Tufts — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 22:49:23 +0000

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.

By: Rob Hyndman

Rob Hyndman — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:03:41 +0000

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.

By: Patrick Tufts

Patrick Tufts — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:56:20 +0000

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.

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:50:15 +0000

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.)

By: Patrick Tufts

Patrick Tufts — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:41:09 +0000

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