Reporter's Story — How HP Kept Tabs On Me 194
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?'"
Stalking (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stalking (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stalking (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Stalking (Score:5, Funny)
You know, there really needs to be some sympathy here. It can get lonely in the bushes.
Re:Stalking (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing says "I love you" like a restraining order.
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I'd be careful walking around those bushes. Never know what you might step in.
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Re:Stalking (Score:5, Insightful)
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What happens when you have a corporate stalker?
Re:Stalking (Score:4, Funny)
incomplete disclosure (Score:5, Insightful)
sshhhhh (Score:4, Funny)
shhhhh! you're giving AT&T and the NSA ideas!
Taking out the trash (Score:2)
At least as far as the Government is concerned.
(IE they don't need a warrant)
I really don't know what law you'd be charged under for taking/stealing someone's garbage.
Re:Taking out the trash (Score:5, Funny)
That should stop the snoopers!
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No no no!!! IANAL -but-:
[name] grants the designated trash collection company license to remove the trash from the residence and dispose of it in the accustomed landfill, however this trash remains the property of [name] until such time as it is degraded and unrecognizable as the original form in whole or in part...
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Overhere it's law that once you put your trash out on the sidewalk to be picked up, it becomes property of the city. If someone would take your trash, or search through it for things of interest it'd be considered stealing from the city.
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AFAIK, trash isn't yours once it is on the curb.
Not sure if that's the case in the UK. I once had a part-time job in a supermarket when I was a teenager, where one of the full-timers was sacked for trying to take a damaged bottle of beer home. It was a large two-litre plastic bottle that had been placed next to a rubbish skip (I think they're called "dumpsters" in the US), and the guy was apprehended as he wandered past the front of the store. The manager knew the bottle was destined for landfill, but s
Only the beginning... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sort of like how they can do drug testing now.
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Re:Only the beginning... (Score:4, Funny)
If the power of corporations continues to grow unchecked, we could come upon a time when some corporations monitor their employees 24 hours a day, in there homes, at play, wherever, and to do anything outside of the company rules would mean termination. It would be in the company's best interest to do so.
If my power continues to grow unchecked, I could be KING OF THE ENTIRE WORLD.
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who watches them? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Seek and ye shall find [acm.org]
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Re:Only the beginning... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the power of the business that is "unchecked". After all, business assets can easily be seized or destroyed. Disrupting routine business can quickly become very expensive for a business especially one ruled by the market like many publically traded corporations. The need for a lot of infrastructure both inside and outside the business generally makes businesses vulnerable.
Instead what is happening is that the cost of some means of employee testing and monitor are becoming cheap for the benefits they provide. Drug testing is pretty clear profit for most businesses. You don't want someone with a big drug habit in a position of trust over money or something that they can sell for money.
Employee monitoring outside of the workplace, especially secret monitoring is expensive and frankly not productive. After all, what sort of employee will consent to that kind of thing? How would that affect morale? I can see legitimate if paranoid special cases where monitoring might be worthwhile, but in those situations they should be writing a pretty big check anyway.Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I wouldn't give a damn if they did their job well and were paid well enough to afford their drug habit. Furthermore, we could lower the "paid well enough to afford their habit" threshold by legalizing drugs.
Employee monitoring outside of the workplace, especially secret monitoring is expensive and frankly not productive. After all, what sort of employee will consent to that kind of thing
I wouldn't bet on it (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Some forms of monitoring are actually dirt cheap.
To start with the obvious, spyware is pretty ubiquitous at some companies, and that includes company laptops. So then people take them home and use them too for IM, slashdot, VOIP, updating their "anonymous" blog, and whatnot, and you can see where that is going.
E.g., someone posted a while ago, in a thread about tele-commuting, about how he knew an employee wasn't really working at home because he looked on XBox live all the time and after a couple of weeks the employee had 5 achievements in Oblivion. (Never mind that Oblivion is a game which can be finished in a weekend if you just follow the main story, or in a week without telecommuting even if you do every single side-quest. And 5 achievements aren't really that much.) That's a form of surveillance.
Google can also be used as a cheap form of surveillance, because most people don't really try to be anonymous. Or can be identified by details they provide.
Cell phones can also be tracked, as proven by a recent article, but I didn't bookmark it. Basically a journalist used such a tracking service on his girlfriend's phone. It asked for confirmation once at the start, and from there it was basically in stealth mode. In that case it was with her knowledge, for research purposes, but you can see how that can happen without knowledge too, if you have access to a "logged-in" phone for a couple of minutes. Company cell phones are a prime example: they can be subscribed to tracking before you even get the damn thing.
2. The line of reasoning that something won't happen because it's not making any money (or preventing losses) for the company is flawed too, and assuming that humans on the whole only do perfectly rational stuff supported by solid logic and numbers. That's false. Humans do a lot more for emotional reasons than for anything even vaguely resembling cold logic supported by facts.
Some PHBs (A) have nothing better to do with their time (even doing lunch and painting powerpoint foils only takes so much time), and (B) are complete control freaks. They don't do it because it actually helps the company in any form or shape, but just to feel in control of something they actually don't really know how to manage.
Even HP's case, if you look at it, is really no more than some control-freak exercise. If you look at the "leaks" they were investigating, the grand acts of treason to the press so to speak, the mind boggles. One executive had unauthorizedly told the press that he's tired after a long board meeting. Or that HP hopes to sell more of their Opteron servers in the future. (Well, of course. Is their any company who actually hopes to sell less and lose market share?) It's benign, uninformative and bloody useless small talk, not any actual company secrets.
But someone was chuffed that a director dared talk to the press at all, even such uninformative small-talk, without their royal seal of approval. I.e., a control freak. That's really how that espionage and stalking affair got started.
3. Even when logic and facts are involved, a lot more often than not, the goals are PR, looking good, etc, not "is it making the company money." You can see it from company policies and politics to PHB's more concerned with maintaining an illusion to their superiors than with managing what they're supposed to manage. Whole man-years get spent on just seeming to do something about a problem, instead of just fixing it.
Or to take your example with drug testing, the thing is: people aren't testing only investors and board members. You know, people who could actua
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Next step: Nuclear armament for corporations (hey, corporations are business, and business is good, right) ? That should stop anyone from messing with their assets.
Re:Only the beginning... (Score:5, Insightful)
Foosball, blimps, bring your dog to work, and LAN parties for the gamers aren't frivolity, they help productivity, in my experience. Costs a lot less than hiring private eyes to just keep your employees HAPPY!!!
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The only reason why the best and brightest wouldn't work for them is their R&D spending. I think HP actually spends quite a bit. For further counter-examples see google, Intel & AMD, Amazon and XEROX/IBM back in the day.
I think more importantly, large corporations have a larger chance of incompetence and arrogance being at the top. As
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It has a place sometimes. I work in one of the few companies in Australia that carries out drug testing on some of it's employees. I don't get tested because I don't handle explosives.
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Re:Only the beginning... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
How many laws broken?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Departures..? What about criminal charges??!
"According to the California attorney general, H-P's investigators also used the last four digits of my Social Security number to impersonate me in order to obtain my phone records, a technique known as "pretexting.""
OK, if I'm not mistaken it's completely illegal to impersonate someone, and also, are phone records not considered "private" information? In such a case there's not only impersonation but right-to-privacy laws that have been treaded upon...
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What, you mean this won't be settled by arbitration?
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What you speak of is "social engineering" and yes it is illegal, however let us not forget that they didn't social engineer, they were "pretexting." I never even heard that word used so many times until this scandal. I am so sick of how changing words can be the difference between criminal and non-criminal. This is flat out lying. But you won't hear any media use that
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Re:How many laws broken?? (Score:5, Funny)
Back a second time eh? If I catch you reading it I'll have you crucified! Pilate.
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I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never gonna keep me down. Jesus, via Chumbawamba.
(P.S. Jokes aside, Pilate is generally depicted as having been rather reluctant to crucify Jesus, although he ends up succumbing to pressure from the crowd.)
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Hence the "According to the California attorney general...".
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My phone banking uses a nice system asking for the nth and nth number of my security code (Which is only known to me), can't companies do something similar? I know my phone company refuses to deal with anything but fault reports unless you dial in from the line you're querying about, is that so difficult either?
If you were gay and lived in the Bible belt (Score:3, Insightful)
Well?
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Pre-trash inspection (Score:2)
Ah, here you go [com.com].
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Also, if you have the time and don't mind a little mess, take the shreds, p
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Only large governmental agencies can afford to reassemble confetti into documents.
No longer true.
http://www.churchstreet-technology.com/ [churchstre...nology.com]
In 2003, ChurchStreet charged $2,000 for a cubic foot of strip-shreds, and $8,000-$10,000 of cross-shreds of standard size of 1/32 × 7/16 inch (0.8 × 11.1 mm) strips.
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There is law on this, and it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
In the British series Spy [bbc.co.uk] one episode dealt with what they half-jokingly called Garbology, with the recruits working through simulated bags of household garbage to build up profiles of who lived in the house. It was emphasized that MI5 [mi5.gov.uk] could do this for real, but as ordinary civilians, they couldn't, so they had to fake it.
...laura
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It really depends on where you live -- that kind of law is often determined and enforced by municipal, county, or state authorities. For example, in my municipality it's illegal to take things from peoples' trash because as soon as it is put out on the
Um, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws aren't going to fix things here, they just give us a method of reacting. The old saying "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." still applies. Suck it up and take some responsibility for yourself, stop shovelling it off on the government.
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My hands were cut off in a shredding machine accident you insensitive clod!
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Yup. Been here 20 years and I love it. Hugs from Costa Rica.
as you slowly starve to death.
Ummm no, not starving at all. I live quite well actually. And I can paint my house any damned colour I choose.
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And for your information, this reporter's personal information was gleaned by fraud. If I know your name & city I can buy your personal information and impersonate you in 2 days flat. I can just put your info into ussearch.com's search bar and pay a few bucks and awayyyyyyyyyy we go!
Rugged individualize that.
Hacking, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is the Pretexting a pretext? (Score:2)
I'm suspicious that it is a cover for what is really happening
in phone record land.
Scenario:
Telcos sells call records to company X.
Company X sells call records to whomever including the NSA.
Re:Hacking, anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Remember, Kiddies... (Score:2)
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"Of course our new HP iShredder conveniently scans those documents and sends them in to corporate HQ before shredding, just in case something vital gets lost!"
One way HP can justify this. (Score:2, Insightful)
Examples Of Pretrash (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Examples Of Pretrash (Score:4, Funny)
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Quote from TFA: "pre-trash inspection survey is in progress for the Tam residence,", IMO this should be parsed as "pre-(trash inspection) survey".
This probably means walking down the street past the house, to see if they can get at the trash without Tam noticing.
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Re:Err... (Score:5, Informative)
This is true, but what affect does that really have on the fact that the privacy of this person was violated because of some maniacal CEO felt slighted.
If the people that did this (including the private investigators) don't rot in jail, we need to worry about our own privacy... not only would it be OK for the government to violate our privacy, but that would open the doors to corporations doing the same thing.
IMHO this is just as disconcerting, if not more so than what AT&T and the NSA are doing...
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<sarcasm>Yes, because illegal and immoral activities are perfectly fine when you're trying to find out whether someone is talking to the press about company secrets. Surely by now you know that company privacy is FAR more important than personal privacy.</sarcasm>
The story was about the lengths that investigators went to, and the types of "attack" made, and the types of information gathered on this person; the summary appears to support that.
BTW I notice that in the interests of your privacy
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Your friends might not be much help, but if you actually have been paying attention just to slashdot then you already know that the government is up HP's ass with a flashlight over the fact that they were spying on employees and contractors left and right, having them followed, going over th
Re:Err... (Score:4, Informative)
Your claim that one of your news sources is Slashdot, but [slashdot.org] you [slashdot.org] haven't [slashdot.org] heard [slashdot.org] the [slashdot.org] background [slashdot.org] for [slashdot.org] this [slashdot.org] story [slashdot.org]?
Interesting.
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I'd suggest adding Groklaw. High clue content site.
I'm calling you on it (Score:4, Insightful)
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Shhh! Please don't spread this around
Obligatory (Score:2)
"Smithers, release the hounds!"
or detain them at gunpoint.
Whoa remind me never to cut across your back yard...