HP: What the hell happened?
Lord knows that there’s been enough commentary on the whole HP scandal lately, but, what fun would it be if I couldn’t add my own two cents? If you haven’t heard of what happened, here’s a brief rundown as I understood it:
Chairwoman Patricia Dunn freaked after a number of leaks turned up on CNet’s website that she figured could only have come from someone on HP’s board. So, she hired a private firm to try and figure out who was leaking the information. Their solution? A little pretexting.
In effect, pretexting works like this. An investigator would contact your phone / mobile provider, claiming to be you and either ask for copies of past phone records, or setup an account allowing them to get the records online. Once they have this information, it may be a simple matter of finding out who leaked the info from the boardroom to the press.
Now, because they didn’t know who was leaking, they did this to the entire board (actually, it’s more likely that they stopped when they found what they were looking for). Now, I’m sorry, but if someone claims to be me, and obtains information about me from a service provider of any kind, as far as I’m concerned, that constitutes fraud. When one of the board members found out, he resigned in disgust. Why the rest of the board didn’t is beyond me.
What needs to happen here? Patricia Dunn, HP’s chair, should be fired. Immediately. It’s a no brainer. If I did something like this at my job I would expect to be fired immediately upon discovery.
It’s as simple as that.
