Hewlett-Packard Spied on New York Times Writers in Leaks With a Technique Known As "Pretexting"
This one from the guys over at Joynet. David Young posts the dirt:
The methods were/are suspect. Fine. A director of the company, Thomas Perkins of Kleiner Perkins fame, resigned from the board of Hewlett Packard outraged over the methods used. Also fine. Good for Mr. Perkins. But in the coverage (page 4, the editor’s note) of the incident it comes to light that Mr. Perkins just completed a $100 million superyacht. I think that’s interesting.
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 7 By Damon Darlin of the New York TImes— The California attorney general’s investigation into the purloining of private phone records by agents of Hewlett-Packard has revealed that the monitoring effort began earlier than previously indicated and included journalists as targets.
The targets included nine journalists who have covered Hewlett-Packard, including one from The New York Times, the company said.
The company said this week that its board had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press and that those investigators had posed as board members — a technique known as pretexting — to gain access to their personal phone records.
In acknowledging Thursday that journalists’ records had also been obtained, the company said it was apologizing to each one. “H.P. is dismayed that the phone records of journalists were accessed without their knowledge,” a company spokesman, Michael Moeller, said.
See documentation on The Smoking Gun