Top executives of Verizon, Sprint, Cingular and T-Mobile USA have been invited to testify Friday at a U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing into the use of deceptive measures to obtain personal information, known as pretexting, according to Reuters.
The same panel will hear on Thursday from Hewlett-Packard chief executive Mark Hurd, former chairman Patricia Dunn, general counsel Ann Baskins and other company officials about HP’s use of pretexting to investigate boardroom leaks.
The heads of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin Martin, and Federal Trade Commission, Deborah Majoras, have also been invited to testify at the Friday hearing, which is on the broader issue of pretexting.
The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on investigations has spent the past seven months looking into data brokers and their use of pretexting to obtain consumers’ call records and other private information.
The panel’s concern about unauthorized access to telephone records gained new prominence after HP acknowledged its investigators used false identities to obtain the telephone records of directors, employees and journalists.
