SAN FRANCISCO — Investigators for Hewlett-Packard Co. sought private telephone records of b... HP mined directors' ph

SAN FRANCISCO — Investigators for Hewlett-Packard Co. sought private telephone records of board members while trying to figure out which director leaked confidential company information to the media, the computer maker disclosed in a regulatory filing yesterday.

Lawyers hired by HP to review the tactics used in the probe — which included tracking board members' phone calls — could not determine if the investigation "complied in all respects with applicable law," HP said in the filing.

California's attorney general is also examining the techniques of the investigation, which relied on an often illegal data mining method known as "pretexting." Investigators hired by HP called the phone company and impersonated at least one board member to get logs of phone calls to and from his home, said the attorney of a former HP director.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer is investigating whether there were violations of criminal statutes that make it illegal to engage in identity theft and to access computer databases without authorization, spokesman Nathan Barankin said yesterday.

Lockyer's office is investigating five other cases of pretexting, which is a fast-growing subsegment of identity theft. But Barankin, who described the HP probe as in the "early fact-finding stage," would not provide details of the scope of the HP inquiry or others.

"It's a very serious issue as far as this office is concerned because of the privacy implications," Barankin said yesterday of the HP case. "We are interested in pursuing any efforts to obtain phone records of innocent parties."

HP said in the filing it would cooperate with the state probe, but spokesman Ryan Donovan said yesterday the company would not comment or provide other details about the investigation.

The company made the disclosures in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying its board would refuse to nominate one director, George A. Keyworth II, for re-election because it determined he was a source of the leaks.

Keyworth — a physicist who served as science adviser to President Reagan from 1981 to 1986 — will end his service on the HP board no later than March 2007. Keyworth could not be reached for comment early yesterday.

Keyworth's departure comes after a January article on CNET's News.com, which included a quotation from an anonymous HP source who described a gathering of HP directors at a posh spa in Indian Wells, Calif.

Although the source didn't leak high-level strategic details or say anything inflammatory, the statement angered HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, 52, who has been on the board for eight years.

Dunn oversaw the investigation of leaks and, at a board meeting May 18, identified Keyworth as the source in the News.com article as well as other leaks dating back to early 2005.

The investigation and attempted ouster riled another HP board member, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Thomas J. Perkins, 74. Perkins, Keyworth's friend, immediately resigned.

Within days of Perkins' departure, HP filed a standard 502-a form with the SEC — not a 502-b form, which would have indicated Perkins' leaving was related to an internal disagreement.

In the months after his resignation, Perkins — co-founder of Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — complained to other executives and to journalists about the investigation's potential ethical implications. He decried it as an invasion of privacy and asked his attorney to investigate.

His attorney, Viet Dinh, former assistant attorney general of the United States from 2001 to 2003, discovered that HP's private investigators obtained the last four digits of Perkins' Social Security number.

The investigator then used the information to open an online account with AT&T, Viet said. Then the investigator called AT&T and impersonated Perkins, offering up his Social Security digits as proof of his identity, and asking AT&T to send a record of phone calls to and from his house in December 2005 and January 2006 to a free, Web-based e-mail account.

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