HP Turns Over Thousands of Documents to House Panel

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has turned over thousands of documents to a U.S. House subcommittee investigating methods the company used to find out who was leaking company information to the media, a subcommittee spokesman said Monday.

“The committee did receive thousands of pages of documents from HP. Staff investigators are reviewing them now,” said Terry Lane of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

HP confirmed it responded to the subcommittee’s request but didn’t go beyond that. “We are complying with the House Subcommittee’s request for information but are not releasing the details of what’s being provided for the committee’s inquiry,” said HP spokesman Ryan Donovan.

The inquiry springs from revelations that HP hired an outside investigative firm that used questionable tactics to find the source of leaks from the HP board to news media in 2005 and 2006. HP, in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing Sept. 6, acknowledged that unnamed outside investigators used “pretexting,” a form of subterfuge where investigators pose as someone else, to obtain personal phone records of people it was investigating. The committee is considering federal legislation to make pretexting illegal.

The House panel, in a Sept. 11 letter to HP Board Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, asked HP to: identify the outside investigative firms it hired; identify the people within HP who authorized, participated in or had knowledge of HP’s investigation; provide copies of contracts between HP and any outside firms; disclose the identities of everyone whose phone records were procured, or were attempted to be procured; and provide other information.

HP, of Palo Alto, Calif., has refused to identify the outside firms it hired, but various media reports have identified them as Security Outsourcing Services of Needham, Mass., and Action Research Group of Melbourne, Fla.

Although HP has claimed that its legal advisers told it that the pretexting was within the law, an HP security specialist reportedly questioned its legality earlier this year.

Fred Adler, a computer-crimes specialist within HP’s global security division, and a former U.S. FBI agent, notified his supervisors that acquiring people’s phone records under false pretenses could be against the law, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The subcommittee has invited Dunn and HP General Counsel Ann Baskins to testify at a committee hearing Sept. 28, and a committee source told the Journal they would appear. HP’s Donovan would not comment. Larry Sonsini of the Palo Alto law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati was also invited to testify, but it’s not known if he will appear. Ronald DeLia of Security Outsourcing Solutions, also invited, hasn’t replied, but the Journal quoted a committee source as saying that if DeLia were to testify, he said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right to not testify to protect against self-incrimination.

-Robert Mullins, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)

Related Links:

• House Committee Seeks Testimony from HP Execs

• HP Pledges to Better Connect With Customers

• Reports: HP Probe Included Physical, E-Mail Tracking

• HP Spying Allegations Probed by DoJ

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