[privacy] A Reporter's Story: How H-P Kept Tabs On Me for a Year

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () bsf-llc com>]

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116122600055097332-SMe_yumWlNpm_GtWJa
fxk__NJ5Y_20071019.html?mod=blogs
 
A Reporter's Story: How H-P Kept Tabs On Me for a Year 
Firm's Search for Leak Led Sleuths
To Scope Out Trash, Compile Phone Dossier
Organizing a Bridal Shower
By PUI-WING TAM
October 19, 2006; Page A1


Unbeknownst to my family and me, someone was scoping out our trash earlier
this year -- someone hired by Hewlett-Packard
<http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=hpq>  Co.

The trash study was carried out in January by Security Outsourcing Solutions
Inc., a Needham, Mass., investigative firm that H-P employed, according to a
briefing H-P officials gave me yesterday. Whether the sleuths ever
encountered my toddler's dirty diapers, H-P said it doesn't know.

I learned this -- and more -- as I sat in a conference room at H-P's outside
law firm yesterday in San Francisco, where attorney John Schultz ran through
a litany of snooping tactics H-P's agents used against me as part of its
effort to identify which of its directors might be leaking news to the
press. For around a year, Mr. Schultz told me, H-P collected information
about me. H-P's investigators tried at least five times, he said, to get
access to my home-phone, cellphone and office-phone records. In several
instances, they succeeded: H-P now has lists of calls I made to people such
as my editors, my husband, my insurance company and a reporting source
employed by one H-P rival. 

...

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