Editorial: Corporate eavesdropping

Monday, Oct. 2, 2006 | 7:37 a.m.

A former Hewlett-Packard Co. executive told a House committee that her company probably isn't the only one that would use unethical, and potentially illegal, investigative tactics to find the source of a corporate leak.

According to The Washington Post, former HP Chairman Patricia Dunn told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee last week that she believes that the tactics used "may be quite common" at other companies and that "every company of consequence has people who do detective-type work in order to ferret out sources of nefarious activities."

HP started its investigation after a series of stories in 2005, eventually resorting to the use of fake identities to trick phone companies into revealing the personal telephone records of seven HP board members, two employees and nine reporters.

The HP investigators also staked out the private homes of these people and even sent a false tip to a news reporter in an e-mail that contained spy software to track the reporter's keystrokes. The California attorney general and the FBI are conducting criminal investigations.

While one chief executive admitted to the House committee that the tactics were unethical and should have been caught, Dunn said she didn't know that such ruses were being used - despite internal company documents suggesting otherwise, the Post reports.

Dunn's testimony was largely unapologetic and leaned toward the philosophy that such tactics are the way in which big business is conducted. We can only hope she is wrong and that HP's actions were isolated to what appears to be a group of desperate and ethically bankrupt executives.