The investigators had indeed stumbled on direct evidence of contact between Kawamoto and a Hewlett-Packard director.
Hunsaker and his team of investigators created a fictitious disgruntled employee named Jacob to make e-mail contact with Kawamoto.
Keyworth was named as the likely source of the leak to Dawn Kawamoto.
Mr Kawamoto saved Honda by betraying his traditions, but he himself hasn't really changed, as his retirement plans suggest.
The team sent more e-mails, but Kawamoto forwarded none of them.
He said that before the meeting he had spoken to the director who had been identified as the leaker, and the director had admitted speaking to Kawamoto.
And both Kawamoto and Brutsch had effects disproportionate to their efforts as the digital herds amplified their signals way above the background noise of the digital pastures.
FORBES: The Hoaxer, The Troll And The Running Of The Digital Herd
Most revolutionary of all, Mr Kawamoto started asking potential customers what they wanted from a car instead of letting the engineers dream up designs they deemed the public should have.
Keyworth explained that he had first spoken to Kawamoto years earlier, at the behest of the company, and said that she was an influential reporter who often wrote fairly and responsibly about the company.
In the years since their first conversation, during the Compaq acquisition, Keyworth and Kawamoto had spoken often by telephone, and he had found her to be a sympathetic listener, especially while his wife was ill with terminal cancer.
Even so, he says, he was surprised, since he had thought of his lunch with Kawamoto as a social occasion. (Kawamoto has refused, on the ground of confidentiality, to discuss the meal or her sources for the story, except to say that she has multiple sources at Hewlett-Packard.) In any case, on balance Keyworth was pleased.
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