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Wal Mart Spies
Posted by Raven on March 7th, 2007
Wal Mart has terminated an employee who was caught recording phone conversations and text messages of other employees…a clear violation of company rules AND employees rights to privacy.
Federal prosecutors are trying to determine if a Wal-Mart systems technician who was fired for spying on fellow employees broke any federal laws.
The world’s largest retailer announced on Monday that executives there had fired a technician for intercepting text messages and recording telephone conversations without authorization. The employee’s termination came after an internal investigation that started after one of the employee’s colleagues “expressed concerns” about the recordings, according to a release from Wal-Mart.
Now the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Western District of Arkansas is investigating, says First Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Groom. Investigators are looking into whether the employee’s actions violated federal law and, if so, if it was within her office’s jurisdiction.
It is wise of Wal Mart to turn their investigation over the feds in this case. It’s not clear if any LAWS were violated.
Company POLICY was, however and the anti Wal Mart crowd has jumped onto this showing some guilty true colors:
NEW YORK — Two of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s most vocal critics _ the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which backs WakeUpWalmart.com, and Wal-Mart Watch _ are putting pressure on the world’s largest retailer to disclose if it has monitored its workers’ communications.
Why would these people care?
Because:
WakeUpWalmart.com has been furnishing internal documents to Michael Barbaro, the New York Times reporter and to other news organizations leaked from Wal-Mart employees.
We all know what’s been going on here. The fired tech had been collecting “information” via phone calls and text messages and sending them along to either WakeUp Wal Mart or to Wal Mart Watch. These two union funded groups in turn, took the info, packaged it up into something worthy of a press release and pushed it to the NYT. The fired jerk is most likely one of many doing the same things at hundreds of other Wal Marts…and it needs to STOP. Why pay the price of breaking federal laws in exchange for doing the dirty deeds, dirt cheap for the anti WM groups who could CARE LESS about them? Internal company sabotage like this doesn’t work…it’s not like Wal Mart has trade and proprietary secrets.
This is childish bulloney. And this is where union bucks go, folks.
March 7th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Raven:
You’ve got it all wrong. Read the article on the union pushback you link to above a little more closely and you’ll see this:
Kofinis was referring to an article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal saying the probe focused on the technician’s search FOR THOSE WHO HAD LEAKED THE MEMOS to the media about health care and wage benefits.
[Emphasis added]
The technician wasn’t the leaker, he was looking for the leakers. He wasn’t the spy, he was the spier.
March 7th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Oh NO you don’t. STOP trying to change what this is about your fucking
asshart. You and your site are behind these spies and you’all know it.
You’ve just about been caught to. I hope to see it all blowup into a major investigation just to sit back and laugh as I watch you and your friends go down.
March 8th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
This technician was freelancing, but I haven’t seen any definitive statement regarding who he was working for. I’ve laid in some popcorn for what could be an exciting spy thriller, with possible double or triple agents and maybe even a love interest and who knows what else. (Or it could be a big turkey of a production – we’ll just have to see.)
What I’m baffled by is why there is such an uproar. I always thought that employees at work had to restrict their phone usage to company-approved business duties. I don’t see how a Wal Mart associate calling the New York Times reporter – or WakeUpWalmart.com, and Wal-Mart Watch – would fall within company business, nor why these calls would have any protection. And therefore, I don’t know why anybody outside the company would have any reason to huffily demand to know if their calls were monitored. If you get called from someone at work, you’ve got to know that there’s a chance a supervisor may be listening.
Perhaps a reader familiar with the relevant statutes can explicate this issue.
(Now if personal calls made on personal phone equipment and not made on company time were monitored, that could be a problem. Perhaps that’s where the Feds may have a reason to be involved. I’ll have to await more info on that part of the tale.)
Mr. Rees seems to be hyperventilating a bit prematurely. Especially if you’re right, Kim, that the labor groups have been caught with their fingers in the pie.
I guess we’ll have to tune in tomorrow for the next episode…