Compare and Contrast

by on September 12, 2006 · 8 comments

Patricia Dunn, the chairman of HP’s board, is resigning. The news comes jut a couple of weeks after the public learned that she had used an illegal technique called “pretexting” to obtain the phone records of her fellow board members and nearly a dozen journalists.

So when a corporate executive illegally obtains the phone records of 2 dozen people in order to spy on them, she’s forced to resign in a matter of weeks. On the other hand, when a high-ranking government official does the same thing to as many as 200 million people, he gets a promotion. What’s wrong with this picture?

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Tim Lee / Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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