Big box brother.

• Position: Flip Side - Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

It reads like a Cold War thriller: The spy follows the suspects through several countries, ending up in Guatemala City, where he takes a room across the hall from his quarry. Finally, after four days of surveillance, including some patient ear-to-the-keyhole work, he is able to report back to headquarters that he has the goods on them. They're guilty!

But this isn't a John le Carr novel, and the powerful institution pulling the strings wasn't the USSR or the CIA. It was Wal-Mart, and the two suspects weren't carrying plans for a shoulder-launched H-bomb. Their crime was "fraternization." One of them, James W. Lynn, a Wal-Mart factory inspection manager, was traveling with a female subordinate, with whom he allegedly enjoyed some intimate moments behind closed doors. At least the company spy reported hearing "moans and sighs" coming from within the woman's room.

Now you may wonder why a company so famously cheap that it requires its same-sex teams to share hotel rooms while on the road would invest in international espionage to ferret out mixed-sex fraternizers. Unless, as Lynn argues, they were really after him for what is a far worse crime in Wal-Mart's books: openly criticizing the conditions he found in Central American factories supplying Wal-Mart stores.

In fact, the Cold War thriller analogy is not entirely fanciful. New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro, who related the story of Wal-Mart's stalking of Lynn and his colleague, also reports that the company's security department is staffed by former top officials of the CIA and the FBI.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Along the same lines, Jeffrey Goldberg provides a chilling account of his visit to Wal-Mart's Bentonville "war room" in the April 2 New Yorker . Although instructed not to write down anything he saw, he found a "dark, threadbare room" with its walls "painted battleship gray," where only two out of five of the occupants even met his eyes.

In general, he found the Bentonville fortress "not unlike the headquarters of the National Security Agency."

W e've always known that Wal-Mart is as big, in financial terms, as many sizable nations. It may even have begun to believe that it is one, complete with its own laws, security agency, and espionage system.

But the illusion of state power is not confined to Wal-Mart.

Justin Kenward, who worked at a Target store in...