Genius of the Week: Leak, Lie, Probe. HP-Style

Play nice, would you? Those corporate types sure are shrewd. News broke this week that Hewlett-Packard has been hacking its own board of directors.

Earlier this year, notes of a private meeting made it into the press so Chairman Patricia Dunn went straight for the jugular and ordered an investigation. Four months later, she announced that fellow director George Keyworth leaked the information, and appalled, another board member, Tom Perkins, quits on the spot. The outrage!

And now the California state attorney general's office has opened an investigation. Pretexting is the name of the game, how Dunn's cronies, or whoever, got to Keyworth. Pretexting is apparently a simple way to get any citizen's private phone records. The New York Times headline read, "With a Little Stealth, Just About Anyone Can Get Phone Records."

Well hell, who needs wiretaps?

Yet isn't it strange that HP is one of the biggest technology companies in the world and in order to do some good, old-fashioned recon on one of their own they resorted to simply making a phone call and lying that they were someone else?

Genius.