HP's misguided witchhunt

Enough said: Mike Masnick at TechDirt captures the essential drift of HP's witchhunt in his post today, "The New HP Way: Using Identity Theft To Spy On Board Members Shows High Personal Integrity."

So, if it's the "highest personal integrity" that HP strives for, can we compare the two candidates here? On one side we have [George] Keyworth, who's offense was to leak to CNET News.com this sentence about a gathering by the HP board: "By the time the lectures were done at 10 p.m., we were pooped and went to bed." Keyworth did also discuss some extremely general strategies the company was taking (HP might buy some companies) -- but nothing particularly revealing. On the other side, we've got [Patricia] Dunn, who hired a private investigator to pretend to be each board member in order to illegally obtain their private phone records (home and mobile phones) to figure out who had called the News.com reporter. Whether that's "pretexting," identity theft or just garden variety fraud, it certainly seems a lot more questionable on the "personal integrity" scale than chatting with a reporter. Even if leaking the info was wrong, it's hard to see how anyone (especially Dunn) can defend the pushing out of Keyworth on "integrity" issues after his actions were discovered using such methods.