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Reporter's Story — How HP Kept Tabs On Me
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "An outside lawyer working for H-P, John Schultz, yesterday told Wall Street Journal reporter Pui-Wing Tam how H-P's investigators collected information on her for a year, scoping out her trash and compiling a dossier on her phone calls. From Tam's article about her time spent, unwittingly, under surveillance: '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. ... But what was surprising were the questions Mr. Schultz left unanswered: How did H-P's agents get my phone numbers in the first place? When did they review videotaped footage of me? Did their gumshoes park their cars outside my house at night? And what the heck is pre-trash inspection?'"
"You watch too many movies."
:-)
You obviously have never had a heart to heart talk with someone that works in HR or a corporate investigator.
These sorts of things happen more often than most sheeple...oosp! I mean people...think. 99.99% of the time they just don't come to the surface.
Sure physical surveillance is costly, but there are large corps and services that are constantly scanning public records, private records, and running spiders on the web to mine data about their employees and the employees of their competition. Don't fool yourself. Nothing is secret any more.
X-CIA/NSA employees have to do something to earn a living once they are out
P.S. And remember to always read those information release forms you sign when starting a new job.
Anyone notice the irony that the company's ethics officer is one of the primary people ordering the monitoring?
Well, perhaps it's not irony, but exemplary of how some companies conduct business. (sigh) Now I understand why most people look at me funny when I say I want to start a business.
We do.
Any surveillance operation needs computer experts. These "people" just need to find IT workers with low enough principles. Unfortunately money seems to make principles take a back seat.
Maybe we need an "Association of Principled Technologists". If we made it important enough, maybe it might encourage people away from the less wholesome facets of our trade.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
This whole scandal seems to go against the original HP Way ethos of having "trust and respect for individuals" that used to be a guiding principle in the company (albeit a long time ago now). It's not the same HP it used to be.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
I read once [maybe here?] that there's at least one other significant population of spies who can "afford" to reassemble confetti into documents: meth addicts hoping to score info they can use to make money, like your credit card statements. Apparently some meth users were caught doing exactly this. The story goes that they have plenty of time [awake for hours on end], the energy, the willingess to commit the crime, and a tendency toward compulsive, repetitive acts [when under the influence]. Because they smoked up all the money they already had, and because you can spot them in the Jiffy Mart by the twitching, itching, scrawniness and rotted teeth, they have the *incentive* to spend hours hidden away, piecing your shredded bank statements together.
I thought it was considered private property until the sanitation workers dumped it into the truck. I'm sure I saw that on CSI or some similar TV show somewhere. Mind you, I am fairly sure that legal situations appearing on television shows do not constitute prior rulings, and presumably these rules vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It isn't - but people do this all the time. Mitnick's only crime was being poor in a courtroom - he couldn't afford the legal staff needed to disprove the government's largely specious claims of damages (they arbitrarily slapped an figure of some tens of millions on a handful of standard instrusion cleanups - we all know that intrusion cleanup is a pain, but even for a large company or government organisation it's measured in the thousands, not millions).
The government lost most of the rest of their case against him. His sentencing was primarily based on the damages claim. Mitnick may not have been the best guy around, but he didn't really deserve anything more than a community service sentence.