The Feb. 10 report, obtained by The Washington Post, summarized in eight pages how investigators, to identify an internal leak of confidential HP information, surreptitiously followed HP board member George A. Keyworth II while he was giving a lecture at the University of Colorado. They watched his home in Piedmont, Calif. They used photographs of a reporter to see if the reporter met with him. And they tried to recover a laptop computer stolen from him in Italy so they could analyze its contents.[...]
The report described how investigators sent an e-mail to a reporter for the online technology publication .com that contained spyware software in an attached file. If opened, the attachment was designed to install itself on her computer and track every keystroke.[...]
Another document reviewed by The Post revealed that HP's ethics chief in January was plotting ways to obtain information on board members and was being warned off those tactics by a colleague. On Jan. 28,r asked Adler whether there was any way to "lawfully get text message content." Hunsaker wrote about HP board member Thomas Perkins, "Apparently, Perkins almost never uses uses his cell phone, and instead does just about everything via text message."
In an e-mail reply, Adler told Hunsaker "[e]ven if we could legally obtain the records, which we can't unless we either pay the bill or get consent, I would highly suspect text messaging records are not kept due to volume and expense. The only other means is through real time interception, an avenue not open to us."
HP executives learned in early February that the investigators it hired had followed board members, tried to spy on his computer, investigated the possibility of infiltrating news rooms by having its spooks get jobs on newsroom cleaning crews, and emailed spyware to a Cnet reporter. HP's chief "ethics" officer
