WASHINGTON - Top executives of Verizon Communications , Sprint Nextel Corp. , Cingular and T-Mobile USA have been 'invited' to testify Friday at a U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing into the use of deceptive measures to obtain personal information, known as pretexting, the panel said on Monday.
The same panel will hear on Thursday from Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive Mark Hurd, former chairman Patricia Dunn, general counsel Ann Baskins and other company officials about HP's use of pretexting to investigate boardroom leaks.
The heads of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin Martin, and Federal Trade Commission, Deborah Majoras, have also been invited to testify at the Friday hearing, which is on the broader issue of pretexting.
The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on investigations has spent the past seven months looking into data brokers and their use of pretexting to obtain consumers' call records and other private information.
The panel's concern about unauthorized access to telephone records gained new prominence after HP acknowledged its investigators used false identities to obtain the telephone records of directors, employees and journalists.
Last week, Hurd said he approved an e-mail ruse to track down boardroom leaks, saying it was important to discover who gave confidential information to news reporters. He was appointed chairman of HP after the board asked Dunn to resign for her role in the scandal.
HP is now under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, California's attorney general, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the House panel.
Copyright 2006 Reuters News Service.
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