WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee and co-chair of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, will be joining the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee to question the panels on the Hewlett Packard privacy debacle.

Rep. Markey has sponsored and cosponsored a number of bills to protect personal privacy, including tightening and clarifying anti-pretexting laws.  One such bill to ensure phone companies did a better job in protecting phone records and that more specifically made use of pretexting to obtain phone records a crime is H.R. 4943, the "Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act.”  This legislation passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously and then was removed from the House Floor schedule at the last moment by GOP leaders, and has not received a floor vote yet.   Mr. Markey has also sponsored legislation to prohibit the commercial sale of Social Security Numbers.

Rep. Markey’s full prepared statement for the HP hearing is below:  

Mr. Chairman, thank you for calling today’s hearing.

The announcement by Hewlett-Packard that its senior management had authorized a secret corporate spying program to investigate leaks of confidential company information to the press has lifted the curtain on a heretofore hidden world.  It is a world in which the corporate leaders of a highly respected high technology leader resorted to a variety of unsavory and illegal business practices.  

The upshot of HP’s snooping and spying program is the compromise of personal privacy for two HP employees, nine reporters, seven members of the HP board, and various family members of the same.  It involved illegal pretexting of phone records, Social Security Numbers, sifting through garbage, and electronic enticements to at least one reporter to download malicious software unwillingly.  

All this, from a company which had earned a reputation here in Washington as a company on the leading edge of privacy protection.  All this, and potentially more, from a company which posts, on its website, “HP and its subsidiaries respect your privacy and are committed to protecting it.”

Today, the Subcommittee will be exploring the responsibility of Hewlett-Packard’s management for this illegal spying operation.  Who authorized this spying operation?  Who oversaw it?   What were they thinking?

I am very concerned that HP may be suffering from Sergeant Schultz Syndrome, in that some in a position of authority may now be saying “I heard nothing, I saw nothing, I knew nothing.”

Where were the lawyers when all of this was happening?  Hewlett-Packard has an experienced in-house legal staff, as well as access to experienced outside legal counsel.  Where were these legal professionals when this spying program was put into place?  Who was vetting the investigative techniques used by the companies’ outside investigators?

Has spying & snooping and corporate espionage so common in America’s blue chip companies that general counsels and corporate directors don’t even ask about it or raise red flags?

Finally, we will be looking at what happened once the results of this investigation were presented to Hewlett-Packard’s Board of Directors.  Why did HP not fully disclose the facts and circumstances surrounding the May 18th resignation of one of its Board members until September 6th of this year?  Why did this Board Member have to repeatedly raise concerns about the accuracy of the written minutes of the May 8th Board meeting and of HP’s May 22nd public disclosures regarding this Board meeting?

So, the law in this area is clear.  The only thing we can do is re-state the illegal nature of it and raise the fines and penalities.  While I understand HP’s desire to halt leaks of boardroom discussions of business plans or proprietary company information, there is absolutely no excuse for the kinds of behavior that are the subject of today’s hearing.  This Committee has a duty to investigate the facts and circumstances surrounding HP’s secret spying program.  At the same time, I do support efforts to supplement the existing legal prohibitions on pretexting with a new law that explicit bars this practice and reaffirms the restrictions contained in both the FTC Act and the Communications Act.  I also support enactment of new legislation to bar purchases or sales of Social Security Numbers in violation of rules issued by the FTC.  Such new laws will help signal to corporate America, and to the private investigators that corporate America hires, that the Congress will not tolerate this kind of invasion of privacy, whether or not it is instigated and abetted by companies as well-respected as Hewlett-Packard.  In short, if the HP episode is the tip of a pre-texting, privacy-invading iceberg, Congress is coming after the iceberg.