She was the fifth person to enter a plea relating to the so-called Kona projects, in which the company, over the course of a year, hired private investigators to try to smoke out the source of board-level leaks to the media. HP’s former ethics officer and three of the PIs have also pleaded not guilty.
Kona saw investigators impersonate their targets in order to access phone records over the internet, in an attempt to figure out which HP director had been speaking to reporters. They also went through the trash of at least one target, and physically surveilled a News.com reporter.
Charges that were filed by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer in early October relate to the phone record access, which is known as pretexting.
Unlike the other charged individuals, Dunn has spoken publicly to protest her innocence, telling a Congressional hearing in September: I had no reason to think anything was illegal going on and I had batteries of experts advising me that it was not going on.
Dunn, who quit HP in September and is currently being treated for ovarian cancer, told Congress that while she knew phone records were being accessed, she thought they were being access from publicly available sources.
