WaPo: H-P CEO approved sting on reporter

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Mark Hurd approved a sting operation against a C-NET reporter who covered the company in an attempt to get the reporter to reveal her anonymous source within the computer company.

Ellen Nakashima and Yuki Noguchi wrote, “The document, one of more than two dozen e-mails obtained by The Washington Post, for the first time links Hurd to an internal investigation of media leaks that has led to criminal probes and will be the subject of a congressional hearing next week.

“Internal e-mails show senior HP employees who were given the task of identifying anonymous news sources concocted a fictitious, high-level HP tipster who sent bogus information to a San Francisco reporter in an attempt to trick her into revealing her sources.”

Later, they wrote, “Dawn Kawamoto, a reporter for Cnet.com, wrote a fairly straightforward article on Jan. 23 outlining the firm’s long-term strategy after a board retreat.

“Determined to ferret out the source’s identity, HP senior counsel Kevin Hunsaker, who led the HP investigation ordered by Dunn, and an HP colleague in Boston created a fictitious persona, ‘Jacob,’ who would pose as a disgruntled HP ‘senior level executive’ and cultivate Kawamoto by saying he was ‘an avid reader of your columns.’

“The idea, evidently, was to induce Kawamoto to open an e-mail attachment with a ‘tracer’ in it that would allow them to see who she forwarded it to. They hoped it would pinpoint board member Keyworth as her source, according to the documents.”

Read more here.