Inside the Bat Cave: Paranoid Wal-Mart's spying scheme

• Protestor infiltration. Wal-Mart hooked up a wireless microphone to a long-haired employee who infiltrated an anti-Wal-Mart group -- Up Against the Wal's -- to determine if it planned protests at Wal-Mart's annual meeting.
• Vendor porn tracking. Wal-Mart used Defense Department monitoring equipment that detected the degree of flesh-tone on a viewed Internet image, and alerted monitors that a vendor sharing Wal-Mart networks was viewing pornography.
• Employee spying. Wal-Mart managers receive a list of email addresses and phone numbers with which their employees have communicated, and a list of Web sites visited. Wal-Mart limits Internet access, blocking social-networking and video sites. It also views emails that employees sent to or received from private accounts such as Hotmail or Gmail whenever the employees were hooked into the Wal-Mart computer network.
• Consultant monitoring. Suspecting that the leaks of confidential memos might have come from McKinsey employees who had been working on a health-care project at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, AK headquarters at the time of a leaked memo, Wal-Mart's security experts monitored McKinsey Internet activities.
• Shareholder resolution threat assessment. The Bat Cave also conducted "potential threat assessment" of those submitting proposals to its June shareholder meeting, particularly those whose resolutions Wal-Mart was trying to block. The list included proposals from a Boerne, TX, religious group; the New York City Controller's office; and Sydney Kay, an 85-year-old, retired science teacher who submitted a resolution requiring that board nominees own at least $5 million in Wal-Mart stock, and his 93-year-old sister Hilda Kaplis. (Kaplis sounds particularly threatening.)

Wal-Mart sounds like one sick puppy to me. I think it needs psychological counseling! Do you really want to support a company with that view of the world?

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in Hewlett Packard or Wal-Mart.