All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Freelabor.blogspot.com: A free daily in Boston called BostonNow is printing work by bloggers. Naturally, "they have not… received money from the paper for their work," but they do get "press credentials or consulting services to help bloggers make money from traffic on their sites." Um, thanks?

Sue You Guys, I'm Going Home: Journalists may be getting dragged into court with depressing regularity lately, but three reporters actually want to see the inside of a courtroom. That's because investigators working for Hewlett-Packard examined their phone records, prompting them to sue for invasion of privacy. (Some of the other journalists who were monitored are in settlement discussions with the company.) The lawsuit is an unusual step – as the Times points out, "[n]ews organizations and reporters generally decline to pursue financial settlements with companies or individuals they write about because of the possible perception that they might be trading coverage for compensation."

Meanwhile, Ricki Lake Endorses Mike Gravel: Oprah Winfrey can sell books, bald advice-peddlers, and "Superfoods." But can she sell a presidential candidate? Winfrey told Larry King that she was supporting Barack Obama “because I know him personally.” Hillary Clinton, it's worth noting, has been on Oprah's show, chatting with her on her 50th birthday a decade ago. "She loves Oprah," Marsha Berry, Clinton's spokeswoman, said at the time. Awkward!

Screen Grab Flap: Ok, so why were all the still photos of President Bush giving his speech on Wednesday a bit grainy? The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Window On Washington blog shares the explanation: "Routinely, a pool photographer - who shares the photo with all news organizations - and wire service photographers are allowed to cover presidential events in quarters too small to handle the usual throng of photographers." But on Wednesday night, administration officials said that the White House Library was too small. "That left newspapers [and web sites] with three choices: No photo, a photo shot by a White House photographer or a screen grab from television coverage of the speech. The latter … generally provides a less-than-flattering image." The White House Correspondents Association is peeved: “This is the latest in an ever-growing series of events in which this White House is not allowing photographers,” said WHCA President Steve Scully of C-SPAN. "Clearly it’s unacceptable.”

Second Coming?: Ah, the woes of copy editing. There was a typo on Florida Gov. Charlie Crist's Web site recently. Just a small one: it changed his name from Crist to Christ. Once identified, the typo was corrected in less than a minute. The governor's own web site wasn't the only one to make the error, however. According to the AP: "At least three Florida newspapers have referred to Crist as Christ in the past two weeks alone."

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If a Lifetime Original Movie were made about corporate malfeasance, the Hewlett Packard spying scandal would make for a fabulous plot. That is because it’s absurd, bizarre and unintentionally funny.

Wall Street Journal reporter Pui Wing Tam, whom HP admitted was one of the subjects of its leak investigation, has an article in today’s Journal (subsc. req.) detailing what she has since discovered about HP investigators’ tactics. Tactics that, in the case of Tam’s stories, were unsuccessful in revealing her source or sources.

Some of the information Tam outlines in today’s piece has been gleaned from the now public information about the probe aired during Congressional hearings. During those hearings, HP CEO Mark Hurd promised that he would provide details into the investigation. HP also informed Tam in an e-mail that she would receive “‘a complete accounting of the information that H-P gathered about you and exactly what methods were used to collect it.’” However, even after she met with HP’s lawyer, John Schultz, she still is not entirely clear about all the details of who was watching her when. Some highlights of what was disclosed:

“H-P's agents had my photo and reviewed videotaped footage of me, said Mr. Schultz, of the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. They conducted ‘surveillance’ by looking for me at certain events to see if I would show up to meet an H-P director. (I didn't.) They also carried out ‘pre-trash inspections’ at my suburban home early this year, Mr. Schultz said.

And what is a “pre-trash inspection”? “On that,” writes Tam, “Mr. Schultz said: ‘We just don't know.’”

Schultz informed her further that “it isn't clear if H-P's investigators actually went through my trash or just looked around my house.” To find out what “pre-trash inspection” might mean, Tam went to an expert, Ann Keating, vice president of a Washington, D.C., security consulting and investigations firm, who said that “terminology such as ‘pre-trash-inspection’ typically means that investigators scoped out neighborhoods and office buildings and tried to figure out if the garbage was easily accessible -- all in preparation for more-extensive digging-through at a later time.”

Keating also said that “the methods H-P used on directors and journalists like me were ‘far from standard practice,’” adding that “surveillance and trash inspection in particular, she says, are typically ‘more tied to marital cases, such as when someone is trying to find out if his or her spouse is cheating.’”

At least Tam has a sense of humor about the ordeal: “Whether the sleuths ever encountered my toddler's dirty diapers, H-P said it doesn't know.”

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“A cast of nearly two dozen top H-P executives, lawyers, security officials and outside investigators jammed the front rows of a Capitol Hill hearing room” yesterday, as the Wall Street Journal reported today, although their appearances didn’t shed much more light on what exactly went on behind the scenes of the company’s investigation of leaks to the media. Most of those called to testify invoked their 5th amendment rights. HP CEO Mark Hurd offered an apology to those journalists who had been “pretexted,” by company investigators, although, “he acknowledged that he was aware that reporters had been sent fake e-mails to try to get information on the leaks and thought at the time it was OK, but doesn't now. There is a difference between illegal and unethical, he said,” writes Broadcasting & Cable. You can read Hurd’s prepared remarks here.

While the testimony itself did reveal anything terribly dramatic, an interesting (and disturbing) piece of information did arise, which reveals that an HP investigator had spied on a Wall Street Journal reporter before, as part of an investigation for another firm. The Wall Street Journal reports today that an e-mail to HP from its outside counsel reveals that Ronald DeLia, of Security Outsourcing Solutions, HP’s private investigative firm, “told lawyers interviewing him in August 2006, that he had informed Ms. Dunn that ‘he had undertaken a similar investigation involving leaks from a Big Five accounting firm to a Wall Street Journal reporter. Mr. DeLia was successful in finding the source of the leaks in that case.’”

The email reports that Mr. DeLia said he "had conducted visual -- not electronic -- surveillance of the reporter at issue while on vacation and had skip tracers call the hotel the reporter had been staying at to obtain his hotel call records via pretexting, which revealed a call to a senior executive with the company. Pretexting was also used to determine where the reporter was vacationing -- somebody called the reporter's office saying the reporter had requested certain information and asking someone in the office for the hotel number.”

The email doesn't make clear who the Journal reporter was, or where or when the pretexting took place.

A spokesman for the Journal said the paper is “looking into this." Maybe they should hire a private investigator.

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Just when you thought the Hewlett Packard scandal was beginning to read like a dime-store fiction novel, now it's starting to take on some Oscar-winning twists. As one privacy watchdog group’s deputy director put it, “If you'd laid this out as a science fiction story, it'd be hard to believe it's true." The Washington Post got a hold of some more internal HP e-mails. And what do they reveal?

Internal e-mails show senior HP employees who were given the task of identifying anonymous news sources concocted a fictitious, high-level HP tipster who sent bogus information to a San Francisco reporter in an attempt to trick her into revealing her sources.

The e-mail sting operation, which was part of a wide-ranging two-part HP investigation that began in March 2005 and ended in May 2006, is the latest in a series of deceptive and possibly illegal tactics that reveal the lengths to which HP went to spy on people inside and outside the company to protect its image and secrets.

Do read the article, and the Wall Street Journal's story -- according to "a person familiar with the H-P probe" a WSJ reporter was followed by HP investigators for several months earlier this year -- it all sounds more like a Tom Clancy novel than actual reality.

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The Hewlett Packard scandal is starting to sound a lot like a movie.

According to the New York Times today, the company “conducted feasibility studies on planting spies in news bureaus of two major publications as part of an investigation of leaks from its board, an individual briefed on the company’s review of the operation said yesterday.”

Yup, spies in news bureaus. Spies disguised as employees or cleaning crews: “The studies, referred to in a Feb. 2 draft report for a briefing of senior management, are said to have included the possibility of placing investigators acting as clerical employees or cleaning crews in the San Francisco offices of CNET and The Wall Street Journal.”

According to the Times, “it is not clear whether the plan described in the documents ... was ever acted upon.”

And, in the tradition of all great American scandals, there is the inevitable e-mail trail. One of the issues in the government’s investigation of HP hinges on whether laws were broken by HP’s investigators in using the technique of “pretexting” to obtain phone records – posing as someone else to gain access to the information from the phone company. Apparently, an e-mail exchange over that very issue took place, according to the Times:

Concern over legality was reflected in an e-mail message sent on Jan. 30 by Mr. Hunsaker, the chief ethics officer, to Mr. Gentilucci, the manager of global investigations. Referring to a private detective in the Boston area, Ronald R. DeLia, whom the company had hired, he asked: “How does Ron get cell and home phone records? Is it all above board?”

Mr. Gentilucci responded that Mr. DeLia, the owner of Security Outsourcing Solutions, had investigators “call operators under some ruse.”

He also wrote: “I think it is on the edge, but above board. We use pretext interviews on a number of investigations to extract information and/or make covert purchases of stolen property, in a sense, all undercover operations.”

Mr. Hunsaker’s e-mail response, in its entirety, said: “I shouldn’t have asked....”

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Some news about Hewlett-Packard today has some business professors sounding a lot like journalistic ethicists. The company had hired private investigators to uncover the source of leaks to the press … and it turns out that the investigators also “accessed private phone records of nine journalists who covered the company, without obtaining their permission,” writes The Washington Post. According to The New York Times:

“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.”

Accessing personal records through computers without permission is a violation of California law, Attorney General Bill Lockyer, whose office is investigating, told The Washington Post. The paper noted that Lockyer “called the accessing of journalists' phone records ‘stupid cubed.’”
Lockyer told The Times: “‘A crime was committed.’ But he added: ‘It is unclear how strong the case is. Who is charged and for what is still an open question.’”

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