[corp-focus] HP and The Privacy Erosion

[robert weissman]

HP and The Privacy Erosion
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

It's hard not to be mesmerized by the bubbling scandal at Hewlett-Packard.

Former chair of the board Patricia Dunn had the company hire private 
detectives to track down who on the company's board was leaking 
information. Those detectives used "pretexting" -- employing a false 
identity -- to obtain board member phone records, as well as those of 
journalists covering the company. They also sifted through garbage and 
considered sending undercover agents into newsrooms. In the wake of the 
scandal, Dunn and other executives have resigned, and criminal 
investigations are underway.

While the Senate was busy yesterday shredding the Constitution, a 
subcommittee of the House of Representatives focused its attention on 
HP. Dunn faced a withering examination. Ten witnesses asserted their 
Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions.

It would be wrong to say this was a waste of the committee's time. The 
HP tactics were outrageous, and high-profile cases can properly focus 
Congressional minds on important issues.

In the wake of the HP scandal, Congress may well pass legislation 
outlawing pretexting. This is not a trivial issue. The Electronic 
Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has earlier petitioned the Federal 
Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission to take remedial 
action to stop pretexting. EPIC said in an FTC filing that it had 
identified 40 websites offering to sell phone records to anyone.

However, in a world where privacy rights are fast slipping away, there's 
a lot more that lawmakers should be looking at than pretexting. 
Digitalization, corporate consolidation, corporate marketers' effort to 
microtarget potential customers and the expanding demands of the 
national security state are combining to enable the creation of a Big 
Brother corporate-state nexus.

A few examples:

* Phone companies handed over millions of customers' records to the 
National Security Agency, without being presented with a warrant. "The 
actions of Hewlett Packard executives, although egregious, pale in 
comparison to the violation of the privacy rights of tens of millions of 
American consumers that should be safeguarded by federal law," noted 40 
organizations including the ACLU, the American Library Association, the 
Arab American Institute, EPIC, Greenpeace and the Republican Liberty 
Caucus, in a letter sent yesterday to the House Commerce Committee. "The 
history of covert government surveillance of citizens," the groups 
noted, "has included unjustified spying on civil rights, civil liberty, 
and peace organizations engaged in First Amendment protected activity."

* Thanks to the financial services deregulation bill, giant financial 
conglomerates are now able to share consumer information between 
affiliates, and they can even share the information with non-affiliated 
corporations (unless a consumer affirmatively opts out of such 
arrangements).

* Corporate (and governmental) database managers don't provide adequate 
security for their own databases. Stolen computers, misplaced disks and 
lost files make vast troves of personal data potential available to 
identity thieves -- and those at risk may not even be notified that the 
data theft has occurred, nor given rights to block access to their 
consumer credit files. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 
just since February 2005, more than 93 million data records in the 
United States have been compromised due to security breaches.

* The first corporations are now requiring employees to have RFID chips 
–- mini radio transmitter chips -- embedded in their bodies. The theory 
is they work as a perfect identity card in high-security situations. The 
worry is that they may give employers the ability to track employees 
wherever they go, at any time.

Finally, there is the phenomenon that Robert Harrow chronicles in his 
chilling book, No Place to Hide: While there are restrictions on the 
kinds of information U.S. government agencies may collect on citizens, 
they are increasingly circumventing these restrictions simply by 
purchasing data collected by corporations such as ChoicePoint, and many 
others.

"More than ever before," Harrow concludes, "The details about our lives 
are no longer our own. They belong to the companies that collect them, 
and the government agencies that buy or demand them in the name of 
keeping us safe."

It's like our lives are being recorded, one activist told Harrow, with 
an array of corporations maintaining electronic diaries relating to 
virtually everything we do.

"Only we have no control over the diaries," Harrow writes, "and we can't 
even know what they say about us. And there's no place to hide."

It doesn't have to be this way. But it will be, unless people demand 
restraints on how corporations manage the bits and bytes that record who 
we are and what we do.


Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime 
Reporter, <http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com>. Robert Weissman is 
editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, 
<http://www.multinationalmonitor.org>. Mokhiber and Weissman are 
co-authors of On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of 
Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press).

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

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