Federal investigators are looking into the actions of a computer systems technician at Wal-Mart Stores who, over a period of several months, intercepted pager and text messages and also secretly taped telephone conversations between Wal-Mart employees and a reporter for The New York Times, the company said yesterday. ...
Wal-Mart said the technician was not authorized to monitor and tape the conversations between members of its media relations staff and Michael Barbaro, a retail reporter for The Times. ...
The focus of any criminal investigation might be on the text messages and the pages transmitted near company headquarters by people who were not Wal-Mart employees; the technician made those interceptions using his own personal radio-frequency equipment.
“He captured all of the text messages that were within a range of his equipment,” Ms. Williams (a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart) said. “Some of those messages had key words in them that he was watching for. Those were captured and put into a separate file or bucket from the others.” She declined to provide details of the messages or motives for those actions by the technician. (more)
What do you think would have possessed an employee to do this extra work?
Do you check for unauthorized eavesdropping at your workplace?
