Report: HP's Dunn, others facing state indictment

Ousted Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Patricia Dunn is expected to be indicted Wednesday in California on charges related to the spying scandal that has hit the company, the New York Times reports.

To be indicted along with Dunn are Kevin Hunsaker, a former senior lawyer at HP; Ronald L. DeLia, a Boston-area private detective; Joseph DePante, owner of Action Research Group, a Melbourne, Florida, information broker; and Bryan Wagner, a Littleton, Colorado, man who is said to have obtained private phone records while working for DePante, the Times reported.

The charges are expected to come from California Attorney General Bill Lockeyer, whose office has been investigating reports that HP hired private detectives and may have used illegal methods to track the source of news leaks from the board of directors.

The charges are expected to include using false or fraudulent pretenses to obtain confidential information from a public utility, unauthorized access to computer data, identity theft, and conspiracy to commit each of those crimes, the Times reported. All of the charges are felonies.

The private investigators hired by HP allegedly used "pretexting," pretending to be journalists from a number of various publications to obtain their telephone records in an attempt to find out who from the board provided information to the reporters.