PreacherTom writes, "Former Hewlett-Packard Chair Patricia Dunn, along with 'ethics chief' Kevin Hunsaker and others, was indicted yesterday on four felony counts by the California Attorney General. The charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy, carry a maximum penalty of 12 years in prison and $30,000 in fines. The indictments follow on the heels of an HP investigation of internal leaks that conducted "bugged" emails to C-Net reporter Dawn Kawamoto, illicitly obtained hundreds of phone numbers, and spied on HP board members." One of the indictments was for a private investigator retained by HP. The article has links to the complaints and warrants.
And I saw that BEFORE I posted. And I knew of Carley from BEFORE HP, where she helped me out of a job, along with thousands of others.
But I don't worry about it, I have Karma to burn, and lately I have found that moderation has been being handled by a bunch of MORONS. I have been marking a *LOT* of bad meta moderation.
I'd suggest that whomever slapped the parent with (-1 Troll) should have saved their mod points for a more worthy cause - defending Carly Fiorina seems a poor use of karma. Granted, Carly Fiorina wasn't involved in the Dunn affair, but she and Patricia Dunn seem to be part of culture of corruption and greed at HP. While working in Manhattan a few years back, I saw three entire floors' worth of HP IT staff become unemployed with a stroke of Carly's pen. During this time, Fiorina was cruising around in Gulfs
So, if they are convicted...does that mean that pretexting is no longer "possibly" illegal, but is now a felony?
In the sense that a conviction would clarify the situation for any who have doubts, yes.
It's useful to consider that the ambiguity only arises when one tries to play games with semantics and rules rather than the 'gestalt'
Pretexting is, in fact, very much like any identity theft. That is, a pretexter gathers sufficient personal information to impersonate someone in order to get a company t
Excellent. For many corporate executive types such as Dunn and her ilk, the consequences for illegal acts are very abstract - at the very worst a resignation, cushioned by a golden parachute of stock options, pensions and benefits. It needs to be forcefully demonstrated to these people that if you commit a crime, you are by definition a criminal, and will be treated as such.
Years ago I heard the famous hacker Mitnick talk about similar investigative activity using the term "social engineering". IS this the same as pretesting? Social engineering exploits the weakest link in a security system are the people running it, not the technology.
A CEO authorizes spying and she gets charged with a felony and a full blown investigation.
A CEO President is spying on innocent Americans as long as he says he thinks they're terrorists, and what happens? His sheep in congress pass a law to make it legal for him.
I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning as much as anyone. But come on, congress, senate, show some damn backbone like your colleagues did when they stood up to Nixon.
Dunn was a member of a private organization. Bush is a member of the government, your "CEO" red herring not withstanding. The government can legally do many things a private citizen may not. You (and I!) may not like this, but that's the world we live in.
So perhaps you're right and the President can do anything he wants
Whoa, dude!!! I didn't say that -- I just said he can, as a member of the government, legally do many things a private citizen cannot; I didn't say he could do any thing he wants.
if she knew that pretexting was a crime. If she can convince a jury that she didn't know illegal acts were taking place she'll get off. Apparently a quirk of California law.
OTOH, she's recently been diagnosed with a recurrence of ovarian cancer, so maybe she'll be answering to a Higher Authority...
I actually watched the C-SPAN hearings on replay last Saturday (stop looking at me) and they didn't use such a simple technique as an embedded gif in an HTML mail.
This neatly gets around people with email clients that block loading of remote images, or even people who don't allow html mail. (How many people actually have Acrobat Reader blo
"The charges, including wire fraud and conspiracy, carry a maximum penalty of 12 years in prison and $30,000 in fines. The indictments follow on the heels of an HP investigation of internal leaks that conducted "bugged" emails to C-Net reporter Dawn Kawamoto, illicitly obtained hundreds of phone numbers, and spied on HP board members."
HP should have accused them of being terrorists first. Then they could have had the Feds do it for them legally.
"The defendants, if convicted, face a maximum of 12 years in prison and a $30,000 fine" The best part about the California AG's response is that the indicted HP execs are being arrested and jailed [businessweek.com]. A $30K fine for those people means nothing, especially if they pay lawyers $5M defending in court. And the "humiliation" that Business Week and its corporate media chorus usually like to claim is the "worst penalty" these execs could pay (like as the total penalty they tried to stick Enron with) cost them nothing,
In any decision a corporation makes, it will choose the most unethical path found acceptable to it's least ethical leader.
Some corporations have many leaders, and no strong central leader. I've found dealing with them to be miserable. For any decision to be made, it only needs to be acceptable to any one of their many leaders, thus, the whole corporation is able to justify acting like a raving-mad power-crazed lunatic. No single individual is highly unethical, just the corporation as a whole.
A board of directors typically has no strong leader, choosing instead a more democratic structure. This can lead to highly unethical behavior, as with the HP board.
I think the reason things work this way is simple. In any decision that might benefit the company, it's easier to simply stand-down and not make waves while somebody else carries out the unethical act. It's harder and more risk prone to stand in the way and demand ethical behavior. After all, corporations are about profits, and you'd be standing in the way of profits. Chances are far higher that you'll get run over than it is that people will say, "Yeah, your right. We were acting unethically, and we were wrong."
That said, I've found the vast majority of corporate board members to be amazingly ethical. After all, investors trust these guys with their money. But, it only takes one or two bad apples...
yeah, go after Dunn and the corp executives. But the telephone companies that released the records without adequate verification or authentication will go scot free. Why? Why isn't there a proper procedure in the phone companies to check who is requesting the info? Why aren't they saying, "we will mail a copy of the report to the registered mailing address. But not to any fax number you say on phone." We are saddling the doctors and clinics with all kinds of privacy requirements. I call my doctor's office, who knows me by very well, to ask about the stupid cholesterol test of my wife, and they tell me there is some new HEPA law or something and they cant tell me my own wife's cholesterol level. And the phone companies are dishing out dirt to anyone who calls. Get them too.
Same way every one is talking about illegal immigration, border fence and this and that. The 800 lb gorilla who is completely ignored is the employers who knowing employ illegal immigrants to cut labor costs and avoid social security taxes and workman comp.
Every one is talking about identity theft, and this and that. The 800 lb gorilla there is the credit reporting companies that steadfastly refuse to let me lock my own credit info. They lobby congress and the law winding through congress will let only the proven victims of id theft to freeze their credit reports. Sort of like people can buy locks for their barn doors only after proving that their horse is stolen.
This is going on everywhere. Dont call it pretexting. It is impersonating. Get the detectives and those who authorized this. But dont let the phone companies off the hook. They should prove that they were not criminally negligent or something. (IANAL).
Too much of lobbying by big corps. Too little protection for the common man.
Manuel the drug dealer screws up the lives of a few people on his route, people who made the choice to get involved with his drugs in the first place. Patricia the ex-Chairman had the opportunity to screw up the thousands of lives involved with her megacorp, people who just want to get a day's work done and didn't sign up for the "let's screw with people's personal lives" game she seems to have been playing.
That doesn't justify jail time. Jail is supposedly for the rehabilitation of criminals too violent to be safe in society.
If the state were actually interested in justice, people who do things like this would simply be forced to pay significant financial restitution to those they screw over. At least make these people do something positive with their time, rather than filling another space in our already overcrowded prisons and pumping more money into the state's coffers.
Jail is supposedly for the rehabilitation of criminals too violent to be safe in society.
That's not the only reason for jail. Violent crime isn't the only crime. It could even be argued that it's not the most dangerous or damaging type of crime. Enron didn't throw a single punch, but thousands of people are still recovering today from losing their life savings to the company's criminal actions.
Frankly, if I had to choose between being punched in the face by a crackhead who wants my wallet, or watching a few thousand people lose everything they had to corporate crime, I'll take the punch. Both scenarios can be traced to the actions of one or two people deciding to do something naughty. Which is "worse?"
Jail should be a last resort. It makes no use of the person or their time, and does nothing to "rehabilitate" anyone.
Those enron executives still have vast knowledge on a variety of subjects, useful skills, and other things. It would have been significantly better use of their time to, say, have them go on speaking circuits at business ethics meetings, or universities, and send the vast majority of money they get from these events to the victims of their actions.
I'm not trying to argue the severity of their crimes relative to others. I'm saying using jail for anything but violent criminals is an absolute waste of resources.
jail should be a last resort. It makes no use of the person or their time, and does nothing to "rehabilitate" anyone
It could also be argued that jail is punishment. Fines and jail time are common in these cases. There is also the school of thought that jailing people like this, may give the next CEO pause, if he tries the same thing.
CEOs do what they do in the pursuit of more wealth.
The threat of taking their wealth should be enough of a deterrence, and I say should only because I'm sure there's a sociopath or two out there who would/will do bad things regardless of the threat of jail OR loss of money.
I'm not trying to argue the severity of their crimes relative to others. I'm saying using jail for anything but violent criminals is an absolute waste of resources.
Waking up one day and finding out one's pension is gone sounds pretty violent to me. Now multiply this by 10000.
So, who's more deserving of jailtime: a) The guy that stole $50 at gunpoint? b) The guy that stole 10000 pensions via accounting tricks?
It's not the violence of the crime that counts, it's the damage it has caused.
How about a gunshot to the head from the crackhead who wants your wallet? Would that change your decision?
Excellent question, AC.
I'm drifting off topic a bit, but your average mugger isn't a murderer, they just want to rob you and split. Any weapons are for intimidation, to force you into quickly giving up what's in your pockets. At worst you just lose your cash and cards, but even the most savvy mugger won't have much of a shot at your 401K or your kids' college funds. At best, you can possibly defend yourself, or get away. So, I feel you generally have more of a fighting chance in an encounter with a violent criminal on the street than you do against a board of directors pushing a few buttons in an illegal manner.
Exactly. Legalize them, regulate them, and tax the hell out of them.
1. Decreased costs to the justice system [many fewer prosecutions of illegal drugs] 2. Decreased crime [ancillary crimes related to the obtaining of illegal drugs] 3. Decreased costs for the penal system [much smaller jail population] 4. Increased government revenue [taxes on drugs] 5. Decreased tax burden on the rest of us as a result of 1-4 [OK, I give. Like that would ever happen]
Ms. Dunn, according to reports, has been striken with ovarian cancer, so I suspect any punishment the State of California can meat out would pale in comparison. Karma, perhaps? Still, if you commit a crime, you should pay a penalty of some sort, karmic or otherwise.
I think Manuel the drug dealer should be given an award by the local Chamber of Commerce for services to the free market under difficult circumstances.
FDR = Financial Death Ray WMD = Weapons of Mass De-monification NLBM = Non-Lubed Bitch Making (wink to John Romero) BFG1000000 = Big Financial Gun One Million FDoM = Financial De-foliation of the Masses CGB = Corporate Gang Bang
Let me get this straight: pretexting is currently a legal "gray area," and you're talking about people getting raped.
I'm confused. Apparently, you've taken your time to rail against government regulation by attempting to make a highly strained analogy between two entirely unrelated subjects, and the second idea you offer to prove your point - ie, that hate crime laws are only in place so that the ebil gubmint can circumvent the Constitution and place people in double jeopardy - isn't even widely held or supported.
Look. What Dunn did was either 1) illegal, or 2) should be. This isn't a question of Congressional pandering. Let me remind you that the current administration and congress hold the belief that big business = better economy. Nothing wrong with that, but it's of worth to note since you seem to additionally imply that Congress is ready to beat up on any corporation it sees, which isn't true.
Pretexting, the main legal question here, should be illegal if it's not. From what I can make of your rather bizarre argument, you seem to claim otherwise. You're wrong.
So if it should be then we should use retroactive laws to get him?
The Government is more powerful than corporations but they are faster and meaner.
The government should be able to dissolve a corporation any time (And in fact they can) but they don't want to because the employees would lose their jobs...
The government is trying to attack policies inside a company which is tough, the best way to do it is to raise the minimum wage, by doing so you force companies to work smarter not harder.
Pretexting, the main legal question here, should be illegal if it's not.
The term pretexting is really, really ridiculous.
When a pimply faced cracker does the same thing (call up people in order to gain illegal access to a system) it's called social engineering and fuck-as-hell illegal. When BigCorp does the same thing it's called "pretexting" and is considered a grey area.
Somehow this has a rancid stench of the application of newspeak in order to justify double standards.
Fucking hypocrites!
(I don't specifically mean your post, with which I disagree. I just wanted to get this off my system)
Darn, they didn't get Carley too. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think Mycroft has a good point. (in that she reportedly admitted as much in her memoirs)
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But I don't worry about it, I have Karma to burn, and lately I have found that moderation has been being handled by a bunch of MORONS. I have been marking a *LOT* of bad meta moderation.
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Granted, Carly Fiorina wasn't involved in the Dunn affair, but she and Patricia Dunn seem to be part of culture of corruption and greed at HP. While working in Manhattan a few years back, I saw three entire floors' worth of HP IT staff become unemployed with a stroke of Carly's pen. During this time, Fiorina was cruising around in Gulfs
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Re:Darn, they didn't get Carley too. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Darn, they didn't get Carley too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Definitely not anonymous; definitely not cowardly.
That's real-life karma.
And, good point about the new mod system. I haven't fat-fingered one yet, but I suppose it's only a matter of time
Parent
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Nope, incompetence is not felony.
Pretexting now illegal for sure? (Score:4, Interesting)
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So, if they are convicted...does that mean that pretexting is no longer "possibly" illegal, but is now a felony?
In the sense that a conviction would clarify the situation for any who have doubts, yes.
It's useful to consider that the ambiguity only arises when one tries to play games with semantics and rules rather than the 'gestalt'
Pretexting is, in fact, very much like any identity theft. That is, a pretexter gathers sufficient personal information to impersonate someone in order to get a company t
Re:Pretexting now illegal for sure? (Score:4, Interesting)
--Pat
Parent
Hopefully (Score:2, Interesting)
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Yeah, and sending them to prison wouldn't be a bad thing either...
Live by the Sword (Score:5, Insightful)
pretexting versus social engineering? (Score:2)
Dunn the CEO vs. Bush the CEO President (Score:3, Insightful)
A CEO President is spying on innocent Americans as long as he says he thinks they're terrorists, and what happens? His sheep in congress pass a law to make it legal for him.
I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning as much as anyone. But come on, congress, senate, show some damn backbone like your colleagues did when they stood up to Nixon.
Totally different contexts... (Score:2)
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Whoa, dude!!! I didn't say that -- I just said he can, as a member of the government, legally do many things a private citizen cannot; I didn't say he could do any thing he wants.
Re:Dunn the CEO vs. Bush the CEO President (Score:4, Funny)
"I thought I'd never miss Nixon"
A guy driving a nice Mercedes sedan has it, making it even better.
Parent
Apparently she's only guilty (Score:2)
OTOH, she's recently been diagnosed with a recurrence of ovarian cancer, so maybe she'll be answering to a Higher Authority...
"ignorance is no excuse to ignore the law" (Score:2)
Dunn is cooked whether she had chemo brain or not.
the litmus test ought to be the mirror, people... if you don't want weasels screwing you, why should you set weasels free to screw somebody else?
guilty, she's a witch, burn her!
For those of us who don't want to RTFA... (Score:2)
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They used this company right here [readnotify.com]. The particular technology that they use is an embedded tracker in a PDF attachment [readnotify.com] that contains the text the victim wants to see.
This neatly gets around people with email clients that block loading of remote images, or even people who don't allow html mail. (How many people actually have Acrobat Reader blo
Stick a fork in Patrica (Score:5, Funny)
It never gets old, does it?
Doh! (Score:2, Funny)
HP should have accused them of being terrorists first. Then they could have had the Feds do it for them legally.
Executive Jailtime (Score:2)
The best part about the California AG's response is that the indicted HP execs are being arrested and jailed [businessweek.com]. A $30K fine for those people means nothing, especially if they pay lawyers $5M defending in court. And the "humiliation" that Business Week and its corporate media chorus usually like to claim is the "worst penalty" these execs could pay (like as the total penalty they tried to stick Enron with) cost them nothing,
Bill's Law of Corporate Ethics (Score:3, Insightful)
In any decision a corporation makes, it will choose the most unethical path found acceptable to it's least ethical leader.
Some corporations have many leaders, and no strong central leader. I've found dealing with them to be miserable. For any decision to be made, it only needs to be acceptable to any one of their many leaders, thus, the whole corporation is able to justify acting like a raving-mad power-crazed lunatic. No single individual is highly unethical, just the corporation as a whole.
A board of directors typically has no strong leader, choosing instead a more democratic structure. This can lead to highly unethical behavior, as with the HP board.
I think the reason things work this way is simple. In any decision that might benefit the company, it's easier to simply stand-down and not make waves while somebody else carries out the unethical act. It's harder and more risk prone to stand in the way and demand ethical behavior. After all, corporations are about profits, and you'd be standing in the way of profits. Chances are far higher that you'll get run over than it is that people will say, "Yeah, your right. We were acting unethically, and we were wrong."
That said, I've found the vast majority of corporate board members to be amazingly ethical. After all, investors trust these guys with their money. But, it only takes one or two bad apples...
Only prison time is meaningful here (Score:3, Insightful)
For these people, $30k is wallet change.
Always go for some scape goats. (Score:3, Interesting)
Same way every one is talking about illegal immigration, border fence and this and that. The 800 lb gorilla who is completely ignored is the employers who knowing employ illegal immigrants to cut labor costs and avoid social security taxes and workman comp.
Every one is talking about identity theft, and this and that. The 800 lb gorilla there is the credit reporting companies that steadfastly refuse to let me lock my own credit info. They lobby congress and the law winding through congress will let only the proven victims of id theft to freeze their credit reports. Sort of like people can buy locks for their barn doors only after proving that their horse is stolen.
This is going on everywhere. Dont call it pretexting. It is impersonating. Get the detectives and those who authorized this. But dont let the phone companies off the hook. They should prove that they were not criminally negligent or something. (IANAL).
Too much of lobbying by big corps. Too little protection for the common man.
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Jail is supposedly for the rehabilitation of criminals too violent to be safe in society.
If the state were actually interested in justice, people who do things like this would simply be forced to pay significant financial restitution to those they screw over. At least make these people do something positive with their time, rather than filling another space in our already overcrowded prisons and pumping more money into the state's coffers.
Really, why does the california govern
Re:Such punishments are too harsh (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, if I had to choose between being punched in the face by a crackhead who wants my wallet, or watching a few thousand people lose everything they had to corporate crime, I'll take the punch. Both scenarios can be traced to the actions of one or two people deciding to do something naughty. Which is "worse?"
Parent
Re:Such punishments are too harsh (Score:4, Insightful)
Those enron executives still have vast knowledge on a variety of subjects, useful skills, and other things. It would have been significantly better use of their time to, say, have them go on speaking circuits at business ethics meetings, or universities, and send the vast majority of money they get from these events to the victims of their actions.
I'm not trying to argue the severity of their crimes relative to others. I'm saying using jail for anything but violent criminals is an absolute waste of resources.
Parent
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It could also be argued that jail is punishment. Fines and jail time are common in these cases. There is also the school of thought that jailing people like this, may give the next CEO pause, if he tries the same thing.
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The threat of taking their wealth should be enough of a deterrence, and I say should only because I'm sure there's a sociopath or two out there who would/will do bad things regardless of the threat of jail OR loss of money.
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Waking up one day and finding out one's pension is gone sounds pretty violent to me.
Now multiply this by 10000.
So, who's more deserving of jailtime:
a) The guy that stole $50 at gunpoint?
b) The guy that stole 10000 pensions via accounting tricks?
It's not the violence of the crime that counts, it's the damage it has caused.
-----
As for the point abo
Re:Such punishments are too harsh (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm drifting off topic a bit, but your average mugger isn't a murderer, they just want to rob you and split. Any weapons are for intimidation, to force you into quickly giving up what's in your pockets. At worst you just lose your cash and cards, but even the most savvy mugger won't have much of a shot at your 401K or your kids' college funds. At best, you can possibly defend yourself, or get away. So, I feel you generally have more of a fighting chance in an encounter with a violent criminal on the street than you do against a board of directors pushing a few buttons in an illegal manner.
Parent
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That person shot in the head was killed by the war on drugs.
Re:Such punishments are too harsh (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Decreased costs to the justice system [many fewer prosecutions of illegal drugs]
2. Decreased crime [ancillary crimes related to the obtaining of illegal drugs]
3. Decreased costs for the penal system [much smaller jail population]
4. Increased government revenue [taxes on drugs]
5. Decreased tax burden on the rest of us as a result of 1-4 [OK, I give. Like that would ever happen]
Parent
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Ms. Dunn, according to reports, has been striken with ovarian cancer, so I suspect any punishment the State of California can meat out would pale in comparison. Karma, perhaps? Still, if you commit a crime, you should pay a penalty of some sort, karmic or otherwise.
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Any ideas?
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WMD = Weapons of Mass De-monification
NLBM = Non-Lubed Bitch Making (wink to John Romero)
BFG1000000 = Big Financial Gun One Million
FDoM = Financial De-foliation of the Masses
CGB = Corporate Gang Bang
Just a few off-the-cuff ideas.
Re:Just great. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm confused. Apparently, you've taken your time to rail against government regulation by attempting to make a highly strained analogy between two entirely unrelated subjects, and the second idea you offer to prove your point - ie, that hate crime laws are only in place so that the ebil gubmint can circumvent the Constitution and place people in double jeopardy - isn't even widely held or supported.
Look. What Dunn did was either 1) illegal, or 2) should be. This isn't a question of Congressional pandering. Let me remind you that the current administration and congress hold the belief that big business = better economy. Nothing wrong with that, but it's of worth to note since you seem to additionally imply that Congress is ready to beat up on any corporation it sees, which isn't true.
Pretexting, the main legal question here, should be illegal if it's not. From what I can make of your rather bizarre argument, you seem to claim otherwise. You're wrong.
Parent
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The Government is more powerful than corporations but they are faster and meaner.
The government should be able to dissolve a corporation any time (And in fact they can) but they don't want to because the employees would lose their jobs...
The government is trying to attack policies inside a company which is tough, the best way to do it is to raise the minimum wage, by doing so you force companies to work smarter not harder.
You know what really bugs me? (Score:5, Insightful)
The term pretexting is really, really ridiculous.
When a pimply faced cracker does the same thing (call up people in order to gain illegal access to a system) it's called social engineering and fuck-as-hell illegal. When BigCorp does the same thing it's called "pretexting" and is considered a grey area.
Somehow this has a rancid stench of the application of newspeak in order to justify double standards.
Fucking hypocrites!
(I don't specifically mean your post, with which I disagree. I just wanted to get this off my system)
Parent
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Kind of like saying that a guy who has been held for 4 years without charges is a "detainee" rather than a "prisoner", yes?