Proclaiming her innocence, ousted Hewlett-Packard chairwoman Patricia Dunn has expanded on the second line to her defence.

The first track to her defence is ignorance of the law.

Now in an interview on Sixty Minutes to be aired this Sunday night, she says the kind of spying perpetrated by HP is standard industry practice.

Dunn says: "Every company has investigations. Investigations, by their nature, are intrusive. If you think that Hewlett-Packard is the only company that has an investigations force - which by the way, is peopled mostly with former law enforcement officers that do all kinds of private detective work, monitoring, posing as other people in order to solve problems to protect shareholder value - you're being naïve."

Meanwhile Henry Blodget, the former Merrill Lynch analyst who praised stocks in public but derided them as dogs in email and who was barred for life from the securities industry, has moved in on the debate.

Dunn did the wrong thing but she shouldn't be charged with four felonies he says in his piece in Forbes:

"Unless the California attorney general knows something that the rest of us don't (possible), Dunn neither intended to commit a crime nor knew one was being committed.

"On the contrary, she took repeated steps to assure herself that the investigation was legal. She sought and received assurances from, among others, HP's general counsel, Ann Baskins--an expert far better qualified than Dunn to determine the investigation's legality (and who, for some reason, has not been charged with the same crimes) ... So what more could Dunn have done? Used her own legal spidey sense to say, "Hey, my lawyers tell me it's fine, but I think they're wrong"? Again, the issue is not whether the investigation was smart or ethical--it wasn't--but whether it was criminal. And it seems a more-than-fair defense for Dunn to say, "I consulted legal experts--not hacks, mind you, lawyers at the top of their field--and they assured me it was legal."

Not so, says John Carney at Dealbreaker. If ignorance of the law was a legitimate defence, then everyone would use that line and get away with it, he says.

"If you commit a crime, no letter from a lawyer telling you it was okay will get you off the hook. What's more, most criminal statutes don't require that you had a guilty state of mind when you commit the crime. You simply have to know what you were doing, not that it was illegal. And there's good reason for that. The opposite rule-immunity by way of ignorance-would encourage widespread, intentional and totally rational ignorance ... She should have used her legal spidey sense to figure out that authorizing her operatives to lie their way into the private phone records of her directors might be illegal."

Good point. Particularly in light of the juicier HP emails from HP counsel and ethics director Kevin Hunsaker published by The Register suggesting the concern was more about bad publicity than the law.

But if Dunn is right and the spying is the just the norm for boards and corporations, the question is whether the HP case will trigger changes in behavior, and even result in legislation.



That certainly seems to be the thinking in some quarters.

"It adds onto the pile of reasons why people want general privacy legislation. Right now there's a gap between what's legal and what people expect. And because of that gap, companies don't know how to operate," Ari Schwartz , deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Boston Globe.

The problem with legislation is that the HP scandal is about bad ethics and you can't legislate to make people totally ethical.