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Walmart must have confused itself with the Bush Administration. From the NY Times:

Wal-Mart's union-backed critics, whom Gabbard identified as among the surveillance targets, accused the retailer of being "paranoid, childish and desperate."

"They should stop playing with spy toys and take the criticism of their business model seriously. The success of the company depends on it," said Nu Wexler, spokesman for Wal-Mart Watch. According to the Wall Street Journal report, the company found personal photos of Wexler and tracked his plans to attend Wal-Mart's annual meeting.

Gabbard told the Wall Street Journal he was part of a large, sophisticated surveillance operation by the Threat Research and Analysis Group, a unit of Wal-Mart's Information Systems Division.[...]

Gabbard told the newspaper that Wal-Mart sent an employee to infiltrate an anti-Wal-Mart group to learn if it was going to protest at the annual shareholders' meeting and investigated McKinsey & Co. employees it believed leaked a memo about Wal-Mart's health care plans. It also uses software programs to read e-mails sent by workers using private e-mail accounts, he said.

Holy cow! Walmart has a "Threat Research and Analysis Group" that investigates poeple who don't like it? They send out spies to groups that might say something bad about them?

The article quotes a Walmart spokesperson as saying that its business practices have chaged as a result fo this outing, but then considering that they fired the whistle-blower and are probably spying on him now too, I wouldn't count on it.

Especially considering the spin they're putting on the whole thing:

"Like most major corporations, it is our corporate responsibility to have systems in place, including software systems, to monitor threats to our network, intellectual property and our people," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Sarah Clark said.

Well, they managed to take the empowering phrase "our people" and make it sound like slavery. Kudos on that.

What's important to note here is that basic freedoms of speech, association, and privacy were being violated by a private actor. Walmart's a powerful enough institution to be able to follow people and make their lives hell if they want to. A large corporation has become a locus of power, and it's using that power to take away freedoms from other people in an effort to ameliorate its public image in an anti-competitive way. Like people can't use their so-called dollar power to produce good social conditions if they don't know what businesses are actually doing.