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HP Faces Expanded Civil Lawsuit in Spying Case
narramissic writes "ITworld is reporting that a shareholder lawsuit against HP for pretexting has been expanded to include charges of insider stock trading. On top of everything else, eight executives implicated in the spying ring also participated in the sale of 1.7 million shares of the company. " From the article: "An amended complaint filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of California for Santa Clara County accuses HP Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd and seven other company executives of selling $41.3 million worth of HP stock at 'inflated prices' shortly before the company revealed that its investigators had used questionable and possibly illegal techniques to gain access to personal records such as phone call logs."
This sounds pretty bad, until you look at the insider trading history for HP. It appears that, with the exception of Mark Hurd, most insider trades were fairly normal for the officers involved. It's not surprising that Mark Hurd was selling 200,000 shares during this timeframe, as 1/2 were exercising an option and the other half was only ~15,000 shares above his prior disposition in April.
Unless there really was insider trading (and someone comes forward to prove it), I imagine HP will get out of this suit pretty easily.
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
Sure:
Some people wanted to know who was talking about them behind their backs. They suspected certain people, but were not sure. So, they got with these other people who told them about fooling the cell phone companies into helping them view their phone records. It was easy. Just call the cell phone company, lie and say you are the person who owns the account, and the cell phone company will help you access the phone logs. So, they did, and sure enough, they found out it was Billy who had been talking to Sara about Jim & Mary's relationship. But, when Billy found out he got mad and called the cops. Sara & Jim, who lied to get the logs, got in big trouble. They had to pay 1000s of dollars in court costs, lost their jobs and went into bankruptcy. The prosecuting attorney and law enforcement couldn't believe the stark crime that had been committed -- lying to get into someone's records. All were punished who needed to be and all were justified who needed to be....
Oh wait, you were asking about the big important people who did the same thing but from a corporate-level. Why, they are professionals who would never break the law. They did everything by-the-book and by-the-policy. They used corporate avenues and channels to rightly get phone records by lying -- I mean, pretexting -- sold stock to make tons of money on the deal and will never spend a day in jail. They are richer by the hour, by the minute. You see, big important people are different and have different rights than folks who have trouble keeping their gas-tanks filled week-in and week-out....
And only the little girl saw clearly that the emperor had no clothes....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
As a former HP contractor who watched a once great company get dragged through the mud and watched hundreds of dedicated rank and file employees fall to the wayside on the deathmarch to the bottom line I can only say:
It's about time that these arrogant jerks were accountable to someone other than the wall street analysts and to something other than the allmighty dollar.
I was there from the time that Lew Platt's departure brought about the HP-Agilent split and Carly's reign of terror all the way through the Comapq HP merger and the Mark Hurd 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' era.
HP employees are still among the worlds most talented and dedicated, but it's getting harder when the best and brightest are forced in to early retirement or have to help in the offshoring of their own jobs -I had to do that, and though I did my best it was an absolute disaster. But since they are currently beating Dell at whatever cost management has little incentive to do things any differently.
-What's the speed of dark?
They should just use the term "Social Engineering". Or lying, or one of the dozen other terms that mean the same thing, but really, how is "Pretexting" to get confidential data from a company any different from using social engineering? They pulled a Kevin Mitnick, and that guy went to Jail, and was convicted for doing that!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
What is this bullshit doublespeak term "pretexting?"
Yeah, that shit cracks me up. Just like what you and I would call bribes but the media and our government call campaign contributions.
Lying isn't often a crime, and it isn't even always unethical. I lie to my wife when she asks how she looks. I lie to slashdoters by telling them I have a wife.
Obtaining private information on false pretext on the other hand is a crime. Pretexting, while a somewhat silly word, is a far more accurate and descriptive term than lying and is definately preferable to it. It does not dimminish the seriousness of what they did, it emphasises it. Even if you were to pick a more commonly used word, there are better ones than lying - like spying, or violating employee's privacy, both of which have been used in mainstream articles. This slashdot meme that they are playing down the seriousness of the offense by calling it by it's actuall name is stupid.