HP Case Illustrates Thorny Issues of Privacy in the Workplace
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CHICAGO _ If you have a job, you have no privacy when it comes to using the office computer.  From monitoring e-mails to capturing instant messages among friends, employers can do as they see fit with the information passing through a company network.
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Companies brace for privacy debate as potentially intrusive applications arrive faster than expected.
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Google responds to attacks on its privacy record.
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Investigators for Hewlett-Packard Co. sought private telephone records of board members while hunting for leaks to the media of confidential company information, the computer maker said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, a former company lawyer, and three outside investigators wereÂ charged Wednesday in CaliforniaÂ on felony charges related to the conduct of an investigationÂ to track down news leaks from the HP board that allegedly broke state law. California Attorney General Bill Lockyer's office said charges have also been filed against Kevin Hunsaker, a former senior lawyer at HP; Ronald L. DeLia, a Boston-area private detective; Matthew DePante, manager of Action Research Group, a Melbourne, Florida, information broker; and Bryan Wagner, a Littleton, Colorado, man who is said to have obtained private phone records while working for Action Research. TheÂ charges were announced at a press conference held Wednesday at the California Department of Justice. The charges include using false or fraudulent pretenses to obtain confidential information from a public utility, wrongful use of computer data, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes. All of the charges are felonies. "One of our state's most venerable corporate institutions lost its way as its board sought to find out who leaked confidential information to the press," said Lockyer in a statement, released Wednesday. "In this misguided effort, people inside and outside of HP violated privacy rights and broke state law." Lockyer's office has been investigating the spying allegations because HP is based in Palo Alto, California. The U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been conducting separate investigations of HP. In a statement released Wednesday in advance of the Sacramento press conference, HP said it was continuing to cooperate with state and federal investigators. The private investigators hired by HP allegedly used "pretexting," pretending to be someone they are not, to obtain the telephone records of HP directors, other employees and journalists who cover the company in an attempt to find out who from the board provided information to the reporters. The scandal has attracted the attention of the U.S. Congress.Â On Sept. 28,Â Dunn told the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that she believed employees and lawyers who said that the HP's leak investigation complied with the company's standards of conduct. The subcommittee was holding hearings into the use of pretexting. The committee passed a federal ban on pretexting but the Congress adjourned before the full House or the Senate voted on the legislation. When questioned about the techniques used to track down the leaks arose in the latter part of the investigation, Dunn said, she passed concerns to company Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd. Before then, the company's lawyers had assured her the techniques were being done "legally and properly," she said. "At no time in the investigation did I authorize its methods," Dunn said. "I asked this to be done in the HP standard way." On his part, Hurd told the subcommittee that he was not aware of the details of the techniques being used. He said he did not read a report from the investigating team that detailed the use of pretexting. Ann Baskins,Â who resigned right before the subcommittee hearing as HP's senior vice president and general counsel, and Hunsaker both asserted their rights not to testify under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution during the hearing. Also taking the fifth before the subcommittee were Delia, Wagner and Action Research owner Joe DePante. Dunn faces these criminal charges at a difficult time in her personal life. Dunn, is scheduled to begin chemotherapy Friday for a recurrence of advanced ovarian cancer, according to a Wednesday report in the San Jose Mercury News. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2004 and had been treated for breast cancer and melanoma dating back to 2001, the paper reported. (Stephen Lawson and Robert McMillan contributed to this story) Â
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Administaff, a provider of human resources services, is notifying 159,000 former and current workers that personal data about them was on a laptop reported missing on Oct. 3. The data was unencrypted.
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Hewlett-Packard Co.  is  under investigation by U.S. federal prosecutors over its  inquiry into boardroom leaks to the press, authorities said on  Monday, adding to the computer maker's legal woes.
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Three former Hewlett-Packard employees and six private investigators take the Fifth in hearings on their phone records access. The head of the congressional committee says he's never seen anything like it. In 27B Stroke 6.
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A U.S. government panel has asked a corporate ethics lawyer from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to testify in its Sept. 28 hearing onÂ the company's use of "pretexting"Â to spy on journalists, board members and other employees.
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(InfoWorld) - IT security professionals need to take steps to properly manage how employee-owned consumer devices are used in the workplace, analysts warned at Gartner's IT security summit in London this week. With powerful consumer devices becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the enterprise, and homeworking on the increase, Gartner said it was important that technology privileges reflected genuine need to avoid security problems. A survey by Gartner found that 15 percent of businesses will have at least some workers using their own devices by the year-end. Brian Gammage, VP at Gartner, said it was crucial that the management of user-owned technology reflect the needs of staff carrying out day-to-day tasks, rather than simply the person's rank within the organization. Individual requirements of users in completing their work, weighed against the security risks they posed, ought to be the judging factors. "It is vital to set policies on user-owned devices, and for the policies to reflect user profiles," he said. "It is amazing how most companies focus on the technology they own and not on other devices and who is using them." One key area of risk being largely ignored was the technology being used by outsourced workers, in spite of the fact they were often handling sensitive data for the company they were serving and its customers. It was vital this technology was properly managed, Gartner said. "I spoke to one major business that was even considering changing outsourcers to a company that would employ people working at home, on their own machines, handling sensitive information," said John Girard, VP at Gartner. "They asked me what I thought, and I said I'd take a note of their name and make sure not to do business with them." But while it is important to set the right policies, analysts stressed that user-owned devices were no more of a security threat than other employee-controlled devices within the workplace. Gartner said the key questions to ask when setting employee owned technology policies are: -- Who is using the technology? -- How controlled is the PC environment as a whole? -- What are the legal, compliance, and service-level agreement implications? -- Who is responsible for buying software licences and security technology for these machines? -- Who is responsible for updating security? -- Who pays for support? -- How does the company ensure that employees purchase the right machine for the job? -- What level of remuneration there is for employees for handling their own IT? Computerworld UKÂ is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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CNET News.com's Charles Cooper writes that HP's "non-denial denial" was a missed opportunity to make a grander statement about privacy.
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Hewlett-Packard board members and journalists were under physical surveillance by investigators trying to find out who was providing information to reporters, and private investigators tried to put tracking software on a journalist's computer to keep tabs on e-mail, according to a New York Times report.
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By Stephen Foley in New York  Hewlett-Packard is facing a federal investigation into whether the company broke the law when the computer manufacturer obtained directors' and journalists' phone records as part of its attempt to hunt down the source of boardroom leaks.
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Microsoft Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and other high-tech companies are preparing to push for data-privacy legislation next year to replace what they consider an outdated patchwork of state and federal laws that are inconsistent and burdensome.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. said Thursday that private investigators it hired to find out who leaked confidential corporate information to the media had accessed private phone records of nine journalists who covered the company, without obtaining their permission.
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No sense pointing the finger at Hewlett-Packard anymore; we have Congress and the FBI to do that. But I did want to discuss the âI didnât know what my employees/vendors/executive staff were doingâ defense -- which was, of course, made famous by Enron , so you have to know it just wonât do. Instead of looking backward, I spoke with a couple of experts on governance, privacy, risk, and compliance assessment about how companies can do the right thing in the future.
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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE   Associated Press writer  SAN FRANCISCO -- Extending beyond the skullduggery that pried loose people's private phone records, Hewlett-Packard Co.