HP spied on board members, including KP's Tom Perkins
Patricia Dunn
Pretty extraordinary revelation: Hewlett Packard Chairwoman Patricia Dunn (pictured here) authorized a team of consultants to obtain home phone records of HP board members without their knowledge.
The board members included Tom Perkins (pictured below). According to the Merc:
When board member Tom Perkins learned of the surveillance, the well-known venture capitalist abruptly quit the board and stormed out of the May meeting.
“Tom Perkins resigned because of a disagreement about HP’s governance practices,” Perkins’ lawyer, Viet Dinh, said in a statement Tuesday. “The company for the past months has refused to disclose the substance of the disagreement, and Mr. Perkins is pursuing all appropriate remedies.”
According to Newsweek, Perkins wrote to the SEC to say that he resigned “solely to protest the questionable ethics and the dubious legality of the chair’s methods.”
Tom PerkinsNow Dunn may be done. Here’s a story about how she may be the next to leave.
Update: The Merc has more news in today’s (Thursday’s) edition, with details about how a person registered an online account for Perkins, using his telephone number, and his last four digits of his Social Security number. This is called “pretexting” and could be illegal. Another story here about how easy it is to get someone’s calling records.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
