Story of the week would have to be the revelations of Hewlett-Packard's chairwoman Patricia Dunn spying on the home phone records of the company's directors, as reported in full detail the Newsweek website.

Determined to find out who was leaking information to the media, Dunn called in an electronic security team to track the phone calls that directors were making from their home and from their cell phones.

Even more extraordinary was the revelation that the security consultants used a method called "pretexting" which requires the obtaining of information through false pretences. There is a debate whether pretexting is illegal but at the very least, it's certainly unethical.

The fallout has been fairly predictable.

California Attorney General William Lockyer has since announced a probe into whether the $100 billion company broke the law by bugging its directors.

According to Lockyer, the investigation "could go all the way up the chain''.

In particular, Lockyer has identified the issue of pretexting as a potential legal problem. There are two California laws that could make it illegal. One targets identity theft, and the other makes it a crime to access a computer database without authorization, reports the San Jose Mercury News.

By acting without informing other directors, Dunn has unleashed hell in the boardroom. Leaking from the boardroom is bad, but there are better ways to tackle the problem. Like talking about it first. As Newsweek reports, the director who was identified as the leaker subsequently told the directors: "I would have told you about all this. Why didn't you just ask?"

Or as Nell Minnow, editor of the Corporate Library put it in this news report: "This is a dysfunctional board. It's like a bad movie. All the misery could have been prevented by someone saying, 'Let's talk about what's happening'."

Dysfunctional is the word for it. But Patricia Dunn is not Robinson Crusoe.

The story reminds me of a bizarre case involving an Australian company, Primelife, where the former deputy chief executive Sandi Porter collected 1.3 million minutes of recordings from 65,400 phone calls of colleagues, including several executives, the internal legal counsel and her own personal assistant.

Like Dunn, she wanted to find out who was leaking information. She subsequently sued the company for wrongful dismissal. You can read the story about the court case here.

And to think these are the sorts of people trusted by shareholders to protect their interests.