… and living to tell the tale. Fascinating piece by the New York Times Business Travel correspondent, Joe Sharkey.

SÃO JOSE DOS CAMPOS, Brazil, Oct. 1 — It had been an uneventful, comfortable flight.

With the window shade drawn, I was relaxing in my leather seat aboard a $25 million corporate jet that was flying 37,000 feet above the vast Amazon rainforest. The 7 of us on board the 13-passenger jet were keeping to ourselves.

Without warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence, save for the hum of the engines.

And then the three words I will never forget. “We’ve been hit,” said Henry Yandle, a fellow passenger standing in the aisle near the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 600 jet.

“Hit? By what?” I wondered. I lifted the shade. The sky was clear; the sun low in the sky. The rainforest went on forever. But there, at the end of the wing, was a jagged ridge, perhaps a foot high, where the five-foot-tall winglet was supposed to be.

And so began the most harrowing 30 minutes of my life. I would be told time and again in the next few days that nobody ever survives a midair collision. I was lucky to be alive — and only later would I learn that the 155 people aboard the Boeing 737 on a domestic flight that seems to have clipped us were not.

Investigators are still trying to sort out what happened, and how — our smaller jet managed to stay aloft while a 737 that is longer, wider and more than three times as heavy, fell from the sky nose first.

But at 3:59 last Friday afternoon, all I could see, all I knew, was that part of the wing was gone. And it was clear that the situation was worsening in a hurry. The leading edge of the wing was losing rivets, and starting to peel back.

Amazingly, no one panicked. The pilots calmly starting scanning their controls and maps for signs of a nearby airport, or, out their window, a place to come down…

From today’s New York Times…

Other documents provided to Congressional investigators revealed that Hewlett-Packard was billed a total of $325,641.65 for various services related to the leak investigation’s second phase from January to April. That included $83,597.42 for surveillance, which was described as “Multiple Surv. And Sting Activity Palo Alto, Piedmont, SF, LA, CA & Denver CO.” A parenthetical note clarifies that the surveillance included “trash re-con of all areas.”

Background investigations on several board members and their relatives, as well as reporters for The Wall Street Journal and the online service CNet, did not come cheap. The bill was $66,688. There were also background checks on employees of Hewlett-Packard’s media relations department, costing $6,435. And locating, identifying, charting and cataloguing records of interested parties — the part of the investigation that apparently included pretexting — cost $44,875.

Invoices from the Action Research Group, the Florida company that is reported to have arranged the pretexting, are also among the more than 100 documents obtained by Congressional investigators. Many of them run in the vicinity of $100, but a 2005 invoice for call records of Carleton S. Fiorina, around the time of her dismissal as chairwoman and chief executive, shows a price tag of $500. The invoices conclude with the line “Thank you for using our services!!!”, all in capital letters, followed by a black-and-white rendition of Hello Kitty, a popular Japanese cartoon character.

Footnote: “trash re-con” is not a reference to the icon on the Windows desktop.

From Hewlett-Packard’s legal counsel, Larry Sonsini, to Tom Watkins, the Hewlett-Packard director who revealed the bugging scandal that has so far claimed the heads of the company’s Chairwoman and several senior execs..

From: Sonsini, Larry
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 4:05 p.m.
To: Tom Perkins
Subject: RE: HP Confidential
Tom,

I looked into the conduct of the investigation and got a report from counsel at HP who was responsible for the effort. I confirmed his input by talking to Ann Baskins. Here is what I learned:

There was no recording, review or monitoring or director e-mail.

There was no electronic surveillance to monitor director communications.

There was no phone recording or eavesdropping.

The investigating team did not attempt to obtain the phone records of non-employee directors.

The investigating team did obtain information regarding phone calls made and received by the cell or home phones of directors. This was done through a third party that made pretext calls to phone service providers. Apparently a common investigatory method which was confirmed with experts. The legal team also checked with outside counsel as to the legality of this methodology.

There was no “secret spying” i.e. no electronic gear, listening devices, etc., were used.

It appears, therefore, that the process was well done and within legal limits. The concerns raised in your e-mail did not occur.

Let me know if you think I should proceed further.

Larry

Eh? This from the top legal firm in Silicon Valley. The italics in the quote above are mine. I’m with Rich Karlgaard on this one. He says:

What rubbish. When your $2,000 an hour lawyer says “pretext calls” are “a common investigatory method” and “within legal limits” — you have a big problem.

California state Attorney General Bill Lockyer calls HP’s investigation illegal: “The question was, was a crime committed? The answer is yes.”

Sonsini is a disaster. HP should can him. In the most public way.

Come to think of it, Apple, which finds itself distracted by an options backdating scandal, should fire Sonsini, too.

Brocade Communications should have fired Sonsini before it was too late. Former CEO Greg Reyes faces criminal charges for options backdating.

Dan Gillmor — who knows the Valley better than any other reporter — has been saying for a while that it’s high time Sonsini was investigated. Maybe that long-overdue process will now begin.

[Source: Good Morning, Silicon Valley]

There’s an hilarious Guardian story based on Jeremy Paxman’s forthcoming book about royalty.

According to Jeremy Paxman, …, the prince [of Wales, heir to the Coburg-Saxe-Gotha throne] is particularly fond of a boiled egg after a day’s hunting. “Because his staff are never quite sure whether the egg would be precisely to the satisfactory hardness, a series of eggs was cooked, and laid out in an ascending row of numbers. If the prince felt that number five was too runny, he could knock the top off number six or seven”.

iBoxer. For the man who has, er, everything. Form an orderly queue here.

From yesterday’s Guardian Unlimited…

At least [Sven-Goren] Eriksson has the consolation of knowing he has sufficient money to cope with life as an unemployed manager. Having negotiated a lucrative settlement with the Football Association on formally leaving his post at the end of July he is earning £13,000 a day from his former employers under an arrangement scheduled to continue until next summer.

That’s £4,745,000 a year, if my calculator is telling the truth. Before tax, of course.

From Good Morning Silicon Valley on the growing HP bugging scandal…

In interviews Friday, [H.P. CEO] Dunn said she was “appalled” to learn that investigators retained by the company were posing as board members to obtain their personal information, adding she’d never heard this practice described as “pretexting” until August. “I had never heard the word before that,” Dunn said. “I found out shortly after that that pretexting could involve a form of fraud.” Could? How about often does? How else are you going to get these kinds of records without government subpoena or their owners’ consent?

From today’s New York Times…

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 7 — The California attorney general’s investigation into the purloining of private phone records by agents of Hewlett-Packard has revealed that the monitoring effort began earlier than previously indicated and included journalists as targets.

The targets included nine journalists who have covered Hewlett-Packard, including one from The New York Times [John Markoff — JN], the company said. The company said this week that its board had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press and that those investigators had posed as board members — a technique known as pretexting — to gain access to their personal phone records.

In acknowledging Thursday that journalists’ records had also been obtained, the company said it was apologizing to each one. “H.P. is dismayed that the phone records of journalists were accessed without their knowledge,” a company spokesman, Michael Moeller, said.

Hang on, let’s deconstruct that last sentence. “H.P. is dismayed”: legally, “H.P” is the Board of the company. But the company said earlier that that same Board “had hired private investigators to identify directors leaking information to the press”. So the Board is “dismayed” by what the Board did? And that same Board has done nothing yet about sacking its CEO.

Goor Morning Silicon Valley reports…

“Colossally stupid.” That’s how California Attorney General Bill Lockyer described Hewlett-Packard’s ill-conceived investigation of boardroom leaks to the press …. On Wednesday afternoon Lockyer’s office subpoenaed some of HP’s officials after the company, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (PDF), acknowledged that a controversial data-gathering technique known as “pretexting” had been used in the investigation. “I have no settled view as to whether or not the chairwoman’s acts were illegal, but I do think they were colossally stupid,” Lockyer told the Mercury News. “We’ll have to wait until the investigation concludes to determine whether they were felony stupid or not.”