Lost in the intriguing story of a Wal-Mart employee who allegedly spied on a New York Times reporter was this tidbit: The "technician" managed to pluck text messages out of the air and read them, according to the company. And these messages weren’t just communications between Wal-Mart employees and a professional journalist covering the firm; innocent bystanders and their messages also were swept up in the spying, it said.
Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams offered scant details of the spying activities by the fired employee on Monday, but she stated that the text messages were intercepted by the employee using a radio device, then scanned for certain keywords. She declined to elaborate on the technology used to pluck the messages out of thin air, other than to say the radio device pulled down messages within "a mile or so" of the company's headquarters.
She also wouldn’t say how many innocent people had their messages read, other than to say there were only "a handful" of other victims.
On Tuesday, Wal-Mart spokesman David Tovar confirmed that the text-message prying occurred, but said the company couldn’t reveal any additional details about the incident.
Wal-Mart said on Monday that it believed the employee’s recording of telephone conversations between the New York Times reporter and members of the company’s media relations department broke no laws because it's legal in Arkansas for telephone conversations to be recorded as long as one of the parties involved is aware of the recording.
It is illegal to surreptitiously intercept electronic communications without a warrant under the federal wiretap statues enacted in 1968. In 1986, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act clarified wiretaps laws to extend to interception of signals from modern radio-based devices, explicitly prohibiting the monitoring of cellular phone transmissions by third parties without a court order.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas is investigating the incident.
Cellular interceptor technology that could pluck text messages from the sky is readily available on the Internet -- for those who have $500,000 or more to burn and can prove they work for a law enforcement agency.
"I'm waiting for the James Bond theme to start playing here," he said. "Minus the James Bond, NSA-type capability, that kind of thing doesn't happen. If messages are sent on a modern, digital network, they are encrypted. You need serious NSA-type capability to do that."
Even that might not be an impossible barrier at a large company like Wal-Mart. Like most Fortune 500 firms, Wal-Mart employs former FBI and CIA agents to work in its corporate security department.
