The Culture of Evasion

theodp writes "In the wake of Patricia Dunn's resignation, Wired's Fred Vogelstein walked away less than impressed with HP CEO's Mark Hurd's spying mea culpa. He says it smacked more of standard corporate ass covering than leadership, especially coming 3 weeks after the scandal broke. His sentiments are echoed in Computerworld's Culture of Evasion, which was written before Hurd mounted an I-knew-nothing-defense. Hurd claims that he bailed out on a meeting that approved the spying, neglected to read the spying report directed to him, and was clueless about the tracer technology employed in the reporter-baiting false e-mail he personally gave thumbs-up to."

Comments

Re:Sarbanes-Oxley?

[maxume]

Sarbanes-Oxley is all about accounting and financial reporting; it upped the bar for what is considered acceptable practice, and also made the officers more responsible for statements made in financial documents. Reading it(http://www.legalarchiver.org/soa.htm), there is some mention of increased penalties for fraud(in Section 8), but it doesn't really seem to relate back to this sort of activity, but more towards lying to shareholders and the like, not claiming plausible deniability about the methods used in an investigation that he was simply aware of.

It would seem rather onerous to hold the CEO of a corporation with literally thousands of employees [criminally] responsible for the actions of all of those employees while they are 'on the clock' or whatever; they have to have some ability to trust and delegate.