The retailer appears to go beyond most companies in its sleuthing. Its surveillance group hunts computer hackers, trolls colleagues’ e-mails and tries to plug information leaks.
H/T Bat for this post!

A Wal-Mart worker fired last month for intercepting a reporter’s phone calls says he was part of a larger, sophisticated surveillance operation that included snooping not only on employees but also on critics, stockholders and the consulting firm McKinsey.

As part of the surveillance, the retailer last year got an employee to infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine whether it planned protests at the company’s annual meeting, according to Bruce Gabbard, the fired security worker, who worked in Wal-Mart Stores’ (WMT, news, msgs) Threat Research and Analysis Group.

The company also deployed cutting-edge monitoring systems made by a supplier to the Defense Department that allowed it to capture and record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network. The systems’ high-tech wizardry could detect the degree of flesh tone on a viewed Internet image and alerted monitors that a vendor sharing Wal-Mart networks was viewing pornography.

Wal-Mart has since disconnected some systems amid an internal investigation of the group’s activities earlier this year, according to an executive in the security-information industry.

More at MSNBC

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