Watchdog Nation was on to a major story.

At a local Walmart recently, we noticed these giant things hanging over the cash register area.

They appear to be microphones.

Watchdog Nation surmised that Walmart security experts want to hear what their customers are saying as they get to checkout.

So we contacted Walmart media relations and left a message. They ignored us.

So we called them.

And when they called back, we told them about the long poles. We asked that they get back to us.

They never did.

So we went back to the store to ask employees.

But when we got there, the long poles were gone.

Did the bugging of America come to a halt?

Well, an employee told us that the poles were speakers, not microphones. And the speakers were so customers could hear the sound coming from the TV sets atop each register station.

And when the TV sets were removed, the speakers were taken down soon after.

Mystery solved.

Walmart is NOT bugging America.

But it never hurts to ask!

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Did you see last week’s story about how the big American telecom companies fell all over themselves giving the FBI illegal access to the personal phone records of Americans without subpoenas? Procedures are in place so that proper legal paperwork must be filed to give law enforcement access to our personal phone records.

But after Sept. 11, 2001, that kinda went out the window, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s Inspector General.

One particular piece of this story, as reported by former Star-Telegram reporter Marissa Taylor, now working for our McClatchy Newspapers Washington bureau, struck me:

“In some cases, FBI agents didn’t even bother with the letters and simply asked in e-mails or Post-It notes for records related to more than 3,500 telephone numbers.”

Watchdog Nation wonders what those Post-it Notes looked like. Here are some possibilities:

All of this is too informal for us.

The Founding Fathers used much larger paper for their writings.

They created something called the Fourth Amendment:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

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Dave Lieber, The Watchdog columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, is the founder of Watchdog Nation. The new 2010 edition of his book, Dave Lieber’s Watchdog Nation: Bite Back When Businesses and Scammers Do You Wrong, is out. Revised and expanded, the book won two national book awards in 2009 for social change. Twitter @DaveLieber