The House Energy and Commerce Committee issued five more subpoenas yesterday to detectives tied to the privacy invasion scandal at Hewlett-Packard, setting the stage for two days of hearings that could reveal new details of the tech company’s now-infamous spying practices.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) stumbled into a political and legal minefield this month when its internal probe of boardroom leaks of confidential company information became public. HP admitted hiring private detectives to fraudulently obtain the phone records of board members and journalists through a tactic known as “pretexting,” which has been in the crosshairs of Energy and Commerce’s oversight subcommittee for almost a year.

“Clearly the HP case is a high-profile example of the scam” of pretexting, in which detectives impersonate individuals in order to access their personal data, Energy and Commerce spokesman Terry Lane said. “We want to find out how pretexting was used and find out any other type of investigative methods that were used by HP.”

The witness list for today’s hearing includes most central players in the widening HP scandal. HP chief executive officer Mark Hurd offered to appear last week to discuss the company’s use of pretexting, and Patricia Dunn, who resigned as board chairman last Friday over her role in the affair, also will testify under oath.

In a statement late last week, Dunn was optimistic that today’s hearing would be the first step to rebuilding HP’s reputation. “I look forward to appearing before Congress next week to answer their questions and help the company put this unfortunate event behind it,” she said.

The committee also has called HP’s general counsel, global security manager, and Larry Sonsini, a top Silicon Valley lawyer who gave legal advice to the company. Two other witnesses are private contractors used by HP who could take the 5th Amendment rather than potentially incriminate themselves.

The five new subpoenaed witnesses, sources said, may have played subcontractor roles in HP’s broad pretexting operation but may have done so without full knowledge of their ultimate employer.

Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton has pushed for months for floor action on his panel’s pretexting bill, which would explicitly criminalize pretexting of phone records and empower the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission to step up enforcement of penalties. But the bill was pulled from the House floor schedule in the spring as the National Security Agency’s warrantless-wiretapping program first made headlines and its future is uncertain.

Despite the harsh light cast by the HP scandal on the commonality and low price of invasive pretexting, the packed House schedule could prevent any action this year, a House GOP source said. The nine appropriations bills yet to be considered look to push pretexting to the bottom of the House agenda though the situation coudl change.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who sent a strongly worded letter to Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) after the bill was initially pulled, nonetheless hopes today’s hearing and a follow-up tomorrow will jumpstart debate on privacy protection issues.

“We need to know why this happened, why HP and others thought this was legal, and how widespread this practice of spying on employees, directors, or the corporate competition [is],” Markey said in a statement.

Representatives from the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission will testify tomorrow, and the FTC is expected to stress its escalating efforts to prosecute phone-records pretexters for unfair or deceptive practices. While the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 made it a crime to pretext for financial records, phone records remain a murky area in the law.

The House has unanimously passed the Judiciary Committee’s pretexting bill, increasing criminal penalties for detectives found using the tactic, but that measure has yet to see action in the Senate. Earlier this month, Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and two fellow panel members wrote to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), urging action on their product.

“If an attorney of Mr. Sonsini’s caliber (in our view mistakenly) believes that pretexting is not already a crime, then the time has come to clearly and unambiguously make that activity illegal,” wrote Sensenbrenner and Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.) on Sept. 8.

Consumer and grassroots groups largely prefer the House Energy and Commerce approach to the Senate Commerce Committee’s pretexting bill. Still, that measure has yet to be merged with an overlapping Senate Judiciary Committee bill, leading to a crush of options that is likely to postpone Senate action until after the election, if at all this year.

Two central players in the HP saga have signed lawyers with significant Bush administration clout. Thomas Perkins, the board member whose May resignation ignited internal scrutiny of Dunn’s handling of the leak probe, has retained former Justice Department counsel Viet Dinh, while Sonsini has retained Akin Gump’s Michael Madigan, a onetime counsel for President Bush’s 2000 campaign.

Hewlett Packard’s media relations department did not return requests for comment by press time.