HP Insiders to Face Criminal Charges
California's attorney general will seek criminal indictments Wednesday against former Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairwoman Patricia Dunn and four others involved in the corporate spying scandal, according to news reports.
Citing people familiar with the case, The New York Times and BusinessWeek reported that Ms. Dunn, Kevin Hunsaker, HP's ousted chief ethics officer, and Ronald DeLia, a Boston-area private investigator, would each face criminal charges. Two other outside investigators -- Joseph DePante of Melbourne, Fla. and Bryan Wagner of Littleton, Colo. -- were also being charged, the Times said.
They each will face four felony charges: use of false or fraudulent pretenses to obtain confidential information from a public utility; unauthorized access to computer data; identity theft; and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes.
The scandal erupted last month when HP disclosed that detectives it hired to root out a series of boardroom leaks secretly obtained detailed phone logs of directors, employees and journalists. The detectives used a potentially criminal form of subterfuge known as pretexting to masquerade as their targets and trick telephone companies into turning over the records.
Dunn -- who initiated the investigation -- said she didn't know until after the fact that the detectives went to such extremes to unearth clues about the leaker's identity. She resigned from HP's board last month amid the uproar over the spying campaign, which has also prompted the resignation of two other board members.
Dunn, 53, who has survived breast cancer and melanoma, will begin chemotherapy treatments for advanced ovarian cancer on Friday at the University of California, San Francisco, according to a person close to Dunn who asked to remain anonymous because a formal announcement wasn't planned.
Lawyers for Dunn and the others expected to be charged did not immediately return calls seeking comment. HP did not immediately comment, nor did a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer.
Hunsaker, who directed the investigation, left the company on Sept. 26; DeLia runs a Boston-area detective firm called Security Outsourcing Solutions, a longtime HP contractor commissioned to conduct the leak probe.
DeLia in turn hired DePante's company to gather information, and DePante hired Wagner to obtain the private phone records of HP directors and journalists.
HP eventually identified director George Keyworth II as the source of a leak to a Cnet Networks Inc. reporter. Keyworth resigned after the scandal went public in early September.
Another director, venture capitalist Thomas J. Perkins, resigned from the board in May after learning about the tactics used by HP's investigators. He then pressured the company to publicly disclose the reason for his departure, leading to the regulatory filing that revealed the investigators' use of pretexting.
The FBI and a congressional panel are also looking into the HP pretexting scandal. Dunn testified last week before the panel, saying she didn't know about any potentially illegal tactics used in the investigation and wasn't responsible for the probe.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.
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