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Fired Wal-Mart snoop says they spy on everybody
Posted by Fired Fred on April 4, 2007 5:25 PM
Big Brother lives in Bentonville, Arkansas, and wears a big smiley face. On the inside, he's all cold clockwork and camera monitors, watching everything anyone does in and out and around Wal-Mart.
The story about their firing of Bruce Gabbard isn't nearly as fun or salacious as when Wal-Mart dropped their top marketing exec, and all but said out loud she was buying every bottle of K-Y Touch Massage Oil & Lubricant she could find at the Wal-Mart checkout and using them to do the nasty with her top assistant.
Bruce was the guy who got the not-smiley face from Wallyworld HR over his tapping of communications between disloyal Wal-Martians and a reporter. Now he's blowing the whistle on his old bosses and accusing them of everything this side of making the refs blow all those early whistles in the Georgetown-Ohio State game...
As part of the surveillance, the retailer last year had a long-haired employee infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company's annual meeting, according to Bruce Gabbard, the fired security worker, the Journal said.No one's denying this stuff. The designated Wal-Mart talking head said it was standard practice. So why would they fire Bruce if he was doing his job? I think it was because he got caught. Just because everyone found out about one reporter being spied on doesn't mean he was the only one.
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 Journal said.
I would like to point out that if I owned a company and that some group was actively trying to close down my stores (we are not talking about people who don't want to shop there, but groups actively engaged in putting me out of business) then I believe that I'd hire someone to go find out what they were up to in regards to my annual meetings, and other planned events. I also would want to know what anyone hooked into my corporate computer network was up to.
I don't see the scandal here, is Wal Mart really doing anything that a sane and reasonable person would not do in the same circumstances? Also, you have to know that Wal Mart blew the whistle on themselves in the firing of this guy, because he WASN'T doing his job. His job was to record only the conversations of employees that management approved him to record (I would assume to track down cases of fraud or employee theft), not the conversations of employees talking to reporters. From the original story published some months ago, Wal Mart had given permission to the reporter (from the New York Times) to speak to any of it's associates. The man overstepped his bounds and got canned, again I don't see the scandal.
I guess it's fun to poke fun at Wal Mart, it seems that the best way to be vilified in this country is to succeed at something. There seems to be a perception that if someone makes a lot of money, it must be because they take it from others without providing any value in return.
Posted on: April 11, 2007 12:38 PM