Hewlett-Packard - the Unasked QuestionsThe HP affair gets more bizarre by the day. At first it seemed like a joke with allegations of board members' and journalists' phone records being stolen. However, it pretty rapidly became clear that these weren't just allegations, it really happened, and a new word - pretexting - entered the popular vocabulary. That wasn't all - it turned out that the decision to set the dogs onto the leak came from the highest levels, the HP chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, who has now resigned from the board. It was also known about by the CEO Mark Hurd, who gave a press conference on Friday amid further revelations. It seems that not only were phone records accessed illegally, reporters were also tailed and photographed, and there was an attempt to plant trojan software on the computer of one reporter. At one stage there was even discussion about the possibility of infiltrating the San Francisco offices of the Wall Street Journal and online news bureau C|Net with operatives posing as cleaners. Unbelievably enough, investigation of the latter possibility was overseen by HP's director of ethics, Kevin Hunsaker! Much of the coverage in the press has been about the unbelievably clumsy 'crisis management' practiced by HP since the story broke, and the ongoing ever more weird revelations. There are, however, two crucial aspects to the story which appear to have either been completely missed, or which are being completely avoided (I suspect the former, rather than the latter - never ascribe malice where mere incompetence will suffice). Issue one: How were HP able to be so quick off the mark in starting up surveillance of board members and reporters? This wasn't a story of a large company bumbling around employing amateurs to spy on people. This is about a well oiled mechanism swinging in to action on the word of the highest authorities in the company. In other words, the mechanisms to mount an illegal surveillance operation were already in place before C|Net broke the triggering story about board strategy discussions. The implication is that HP had permanent espionage facilities available, and from the speed and smoothness of the original operation, this wasn't the first time they had been used. So, the question is how long has HP had an espionage department, and what other 'black ops' has it carried out in the past? Issue two: How many other large companies have similar facilities, and have used them? The best way I can explain this is by analogy with the Enron scandal. When the Enron story broke it looked like an isolated, albeit very big, incident. But as more details emerged it became clear that Enron were not alone in what they were doing, they had merely taken what 'everyone' was doing to the limit, and as such were the first to fall. The question is to what extent is the HP affair a similar tip of the iceberg? Let me suggest a pointer. When the story first broke, HP's first line of defence was that they weren't doing anything illegal. This was so patently absurd to the press that there was a great deal of mocking about the clumsiness of HP's damage limitation process. At the time some surprise was expressed about the incompetence. After all the HP public relations machine has a great deal of experience of handling potentially damaging problems. There is, though, a scenario within which HP's initial response makes sense. Perhaps they genuinely thought there was no problem, because they, and other big companies routinely carry out such actions... The problem is that it's easy to come up with conspiracy theories, both about the government and big business. So how likely are the two scenarios I've laid out above? I truly don't know, though I suspect the first issue is probably correct, if only because of the slickness of the operational side of the affair - note that it didn't come apart until the principals actually used the information they had obtained. As far as the second scenario goes, it's difficult to say. Hopefully I'm wrong, but we won't find out unless the questions are asked, or the law enforcement authorities in California probe a little deeper than just the obvious illegalities. In the mean time here is a selection of other people's takes on the issue: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/19/hp_spy_reporters/ |
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