Broker, trader, lawyer, spy

by Eamon Javers

In 2006 a spy scandal at Hewlett Packard erupted when it was revealed that Patricia Dunn, then the company's chairwoman, had hired a team to spy on journalists covering the company and members of its board. These spies used a technique called "pretexting," pretending to be someone else to obtain phone records, in order to figure out how information had been leaking from the company. In response, Congress passed a law banning pretexting, but the visibility of the corporate intelligence industry surfaced and then vanished almost as quickly.As it turns out, the pretexting at HP is just one, relatively benign example of the work of an industry with tentacles in almost every industry in almost every corner of the globe. Intelligence companies and the spies they employ are setting up fake websites to elicit information, trailing individuals and mirroring travel itineraries, dumpster-diving in household and corporate trash, using ultra-sophisticated satellite surveillance to spy on facilities