HP’s Dunn, Fiorina to appear on ’60 Minutes’

Two key figures in the Hewlett-Packard spying scandal will give their sides of the story in interviews on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

Patricia Dunn, former chairman of the technology company who was charged with four felonies in California, and Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive officer, president and chairman, gave separate interviews on the subject, according to information released by CBS Friday.

In her interview, Dunn says companies conduct such investigations often.

“Every company has investigations. Investigations, by their nature, are intrusive,” Dunn tells “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl. “If you think that Hewlett-Packard is the only company that has an investigations force — which by the way, is peopled mostly with former law enforcement officers that do all kinds of private detective work, monitoring, posing as other people in order to solve problems to protect shareholder value — you’re being naïve.”

Dunn tells Stahl she is innocent of the charges she and four others connected to the case are facing: using false pretenses to obtain confidential information from a public utility, unauthorized access of computer data, identity theft and conspiracy. Four other people face the same charges.

Dunn made a brief court appearance Thursday in Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose and will return to court Nov. 17 for an arraignment. HP is based in Palo Alto, which is also in Santa Clara County.

Fiorina was also interviewed by Stahl to promote her book about her HP days, “Tough Choices: A Memoir,” which is to be released next week.

Fiorina says she was “shocked” to discover the lengths to which investigators allegedly went to probe the source of HP leaks to the media, including the use of pretexting — using false pretenses — to gain access to phone records of people who were targets of the investigation.

“Well, I mean, I was shocked to hear about the depth and the range of some of those tactics and — and shocked to hear that I might have been the subject of some of them,” Fiorina said.

Documents released Wednesday by the California Attorney General’s Office show that Fiorina’s phone records were among those accessed by private investigators via pretexting.

Dunn, who succeeded Fiorina as chairman after Fiorina’s firing in March 2005, launched an investigation to find the source of leaks of board deliberations prior to Fiorina’s firing. Dunn authorized a second probe in 2006 after a news report in January that quoted an anonymous source on HP’s board.

Fiorina says in the “60 Minutes” interview that she sought to find the source of news leaks when she was chairman, but that was limited compared to what has been alleged under Dunn’s chairmanship.

“I wouldn’t call what I did when I was faced with a leak — I wouldn’t even call it an investigation. I would call it a series of conversations with people. The reality is I knew very well who had talked outside the boardroom. Only one of the people who talked outside of the boardroom confessed. But, I knew who had done it. They knew who — they had done it and so did everyone else on the board,” Fiorina says, according to a release from CBS News.