The spying game: Companies monitor activists because they can

[xchrom]

http://grist.org/politics/the-spying-game-companies-monitor-activists-because-they-can/

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Back in the ’40s, my grandmother lost her scholarship to college after the school found out she had attended a meeting run by a communist organization. Whoever made the call that my grandmother was a communist rabblerouser no longer deserving educational subsidy was clearly acting on bad intel. It would be hard to think of a more terrible communist than my grandmother: She loved playing the stock market.

As someone who enjoys hanging out with both spooks and radicals, I leave a greater trail of troublemaking by proximity than the people who snooped on my nana could have ever dreamed of. Selfishly, I wonder, thehow does this affect me? The epic growth of Homeland Security in the last decade has also led to a commensurate growth in people trained by federal intelligence agencies working for private intelligence firms. Wal-Mart’s internal security department, for example, is filled with former agents from the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other government agencies.

There’s a good deal of spying that you can do on a person before you move into the realm of illegality. It’s still perfectly legal to use a false identity — including fake ID cards and other documentation — to gather information, as long as your lie doesn’t net you certain kinds of information that have been established (usually via a court ruling) as protected under privacy law. Searching through trash for information is perfectly legal, as long as the trash is on a curb or other public property.

Still, information shows up — mostly in lawsuits between corporations, or corporations and their employees — that suggests private security firms routinely use surveillance in ways that break the law, like tracking cellphone calls and using keystroke loggers to obtain access to private email accounts. Wal-Mart’s former director of marketing sued the company for wrongful dismissal, after Wal-Mart somehow obtained access to the Gmail account of another employee that she was having an affair with, and fired both of them for violating company policy. The case was settled out of court.

[marmar]

1. k/r

[Coyotl]

2. Better right to privacy laws would be useful.