When National Security Agency director Michael Hayden told then-CEO-of-HP/now-Republican-presidential-hopeful Carly Fiorina he needed servers to put the entire USA under unconstitutional surveillance, she leapt into action to supply him with the materiel he needed.
Fiorina has proposed an increase in military spending as part of her platform: an additional $500B over the next decade.
Fiorina, who had been named HP CEO in 1999 and is now running for president as a Republican, promptly redirected truckloads of HP servers that had been destined for retail stores into the custody of federal officials who took them to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.
The servers were needed for a massive new warrantless surveillance program codenamed "Stellar Wind" that had been approved by President George W. Bush.
Fiorina acknowledged providing the HP servers to the NSA during an interview with Michael Isikoff in which she defended the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance programs and framed her collaboration with the NSA in patriotic terms.
"I felt it was my duty to help, and so we did," Fiorina said. "They were ramping up a whole set of programs and needed a lot of data crunching capability to try and monitor a whole set of threats… What I knew at the time was our nation had been attacked."
Carly Fiorina: I Supplied HP Servers for NSA Snooping
[Sam Gustin/Vice]