Freedom, Privacy and Social Instability in the Information Age

It's no secret the Internet Age brings with it tremendous destabilization, along with great potential for losses of privacy. In the West, we're constantly now struggling, on all fronts, to sort out what principles of privacy and freedom we need to translate and update for the Information Age. The U. S. Government struggles to gain access to information for security purposes, but the Consitituion includes civil protections that require court review and warrants prior to searches. Historically, lack of strict protections for citizens leads to totalitarian abuse of power by governments. "Trust us" is not a sufficient guarantee of a free society. Unchecked, unaccountable power leads to unmitigated abuse, always and everywhere throughout history.

Other institutional holders of concentrated power - large corporations - also struggle in the new playing field to determine how to use information, and the power information access confers, appropriately, as in the HP scandal story quoted below.

The Internet does enable small groups of people to organize in ways they could not do easily in the past. It also makes citizen publishing of content, news, news analysis, video and so forth far more possible, without having to sell content to an establishment media filter reliant on advertising and establishment goodwill for survival.

For example, American politicians have been rocked and lost power due in no small measure to citizen based Internet activism. In my home state, incumbent Senator George Allen's reelection campaign has gone into a nosedive following the Internet publication of a home made video of him calling a an American born twenty-something of Indian descent a racial epithet. The masses are using the tools of the Information age to shift the balance of power against established institutions, and it's no surprise the institutions are fighting back. I've previously written about the net neutrality issue, and that's political fight represents a major front on this social fault line in the Information Age.

Privacy. Information. Power. And here we come to today's HP story (emphasis added):

Five to Face Charges in HP Scandal

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 4, 2006; 1:58 PM

California's attorney general is preparing to file criminal complaints today against ousted Hewlett-Packard Co. chairman Patricia C. Dunn and four others for their roles in the Hewlett-Packard Co. spying operation that surfaced last month, according to sources close to the case.

The criminal complaints are expected to be filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court in California against Dunn; former HP ethics director and senior legal counsel Kevin Hunsaker; and three HP outsiders, including Boston security contractor Ronald R. DeLia and two private investigators, Bryan Wagner, of Littleton, Colo., and Matthew DePante, whose firm is in Melbourne, Fla.

All five will be charged with four felony offenses under California statutes. The offenses include obtaining phone records under false pretenses; unauthorized access to and use of computer data, identity theft; and conspiracy to commit the crimes. They carry penalties of $10,000 and/or imprisonment for up to three years.

Attorney General Bill Lockyer has been investigating the case for weeks.

The charges stem from an extensive HP spying operation that involved impersonating people to obtain their phone records. The two-phase operation began in 2005 and ended in spring 2006, under Dunn's direction, and was designed to identify who inside HP or on its board was leaking confidential company information to reporters.

The charges will come just days after Dunn, Hunsaker and HP Chief Executive Mark V. Hurd appeared before a congressional investigative subcommittee to answer questions about the methods the company used to find out who was leaking information to the news media. Those methods included lying to get phone records; following or watching board directors, journalists and their family members at home and at conferences; and conducting a "sting" operation on a reporter. In one instance, investigators placed tracer software in an e-mail to a reporter to try to track who she communicated with.

The criminal charges will be the first lodged in the case, which is also being investigated by the FBI.

Dunn, 53, resigned at the request of the board last month. A breast cancer survivor, she is battling stage 4 ovarian cancer and was due to begin chemotherapy today.

Dunn told the House subcommittee last week that she had been assured the phone records used to help identify who was leaking HP information to the media were obtained illegally.

Documents HP submitted to the House Energy and Commerce oversight and investigative committee, however, show that Dunn was told in June 2005 by HP's Boston security contractor, DeLia, that he was securing personal phone records of directors and journalists by means of "pretext."

Pretexting involves impersonating someone to obtain their phone records. In addition to violating California laws, it is a violation of federal wire fraud statutes, according to former federal prosecutors.

Security, privacy, liberty, free societies, fair markets, concentrated social power versus populist power. The issues are the same for every generation, and we're in new global, social territory together. The HP story is pretty crazy, but I can guarantee you this is not unique stuff. HP has not been the only big player doing this, because there are a number of boutique corporate security firms competing in precisely this kind of market.