According to the New York Times:
Those briefed on the company’s review of the operation say detectives tried to plant software on at least one journalist’s computer that would enable messages to be traced, and also followed directors and possibly a journalist in an attempt to identify a leaker on the board.
I don’t tend to take the Times at face value because they’ve been so spectacularly wrong on their front page regarding matters of life and death. Look up the stories from the Times by Judith Miller (either credited to her alone or working with her colleagues at the Times) regarding the rationale for invading and occupying Iraq (even referred to by Vice President Cheney in a Sunday morning political chat show). Then compare her leaving of her own accord to how the Times treated Jayson Blair before Miller’s lies became common knowledge; Blair being another lying Times reporter whose articles focused on matters of far less significance. Whether viewed as an ugly pattern of poor peer review or cooperating with leaders whose feet should have been held to the fire, the Times isn’t a paper to be trusted.
I think Alexander Cockburn’s article from August 18, 2003, co-proprietor of Counterpunch.org said it well:
We don’t have full 20/20 hindsight yet, but we do know for certain that all the sensational disclosures in Miller’s major stories between late 2001 and early summer, 2003, promoted disingenuous lies. There were no secret biolabs under Saddam’s palaces; no nuclear factories across Iraq secretly working at full tilt. A huge percentage of what Miller wrote was garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration’s propaganda drive towards invasion.
What does that make Miller? She was a witting cheer-leader for war. She knew what she was doing.
And what does Miller’s performance make the New York Times? Didn’t any senior editors at the New York Times or even the boss, A.O. Sulzberger, ask themselves whether it was appropriate to have a trio of Times reporters touting their book Germs on tv and radio, while simultaneously running stories in the New York Times headlining the risks of biowar and thus creating just the sort of public alarm beneficial to the sales of their book. Isn’t that the sort of conflict of interest prosecutors have been hounding Wall Street punters for?
Hence, I wonder if the Times is lying to us again or if this news about HP is so.