I guess I''m coming a little late to the party on this one, because it''s been around a while.The thing that has my arm hairs standing on end is some of the services they offer over at eWatch, now owned by PR Newswire.

Here''s what it says upfront, right on the Web site:

"Today, more than 800 of the world''s largest corporations trust eWatch to help them accurately track what is appearing in cyberspace. Safeguard stakeholder value, improve customer service, protect corporate reputation, monitor competition, identify trends, and pinpoint corporate activism..."

Or, in the words of a BusinessWeek Online piece I saw recently, "track down outspoken cyber citizens" and "retaliate" against them with "re-education" efforts -- or worse.

You think this doesn''t happen? Consider this: Credit Suisse First Boston just slapped 10 anonymous message board posters and one named person with a lawsuit alleging slander for remarks they posted on a Yahoo! Discussion forum. The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the posted messages "contain false and defamatory statements regarding the integrity and professional and business reputation of CSFB and one of its research analysts."

Now I don''t know whether Credit Suisse First Boston uses the eWatch service or not. The point is that it seems like every Web user out there today needs an Internet Miranda Warning. As in: "Freeze, surfer -- everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." Talk about a chilling effect on free speech!

eWatch says it monitors "thousands of editorial-based sites on the Web," as well as "more than 63,000 Usenet groups and Electronic Mailing Lists." Furthermore it "monitors hundreds of public discussion areas on AOL and CompuServe" and the finance/investor bulletin boards on Yahoo!, Motley Fool and Silicon Investor.

So if you''re ticked off about that refrigerator you bought at an e-commerce site from a giant manufacturer, or the brokerage-recommended stock you bought that tanked three days later, and you go online to complain about it, watch out. You are now an "anti-corporate activist," as it has come to be known in the PR trade.

At eWatch, client companies submit keywords (which are then monitored) and eWatch forwards the results to clients. "Every report lists activity for each day, including a brief analysis, an executive summary and the full text of all of the clips we gathered," the company says.

Tracking so-called "perpetrators" is also part of the service, eWatch National Product Manager Ted Skinner was quoted as saying in the BusinessWeek piece. That''s done by "using a variety of methods, such as following leads found in postings and Web sites, working with ISPs, involving law enforcement, conducting virtual stings and other tactics," he said.

Pricing for the basic service starts at $3,600 and can run up into the six figures, depending on the number of users at your company. eWatch''s CyberSleuth service can actually "identify the entity behind the screen name(s) listed," eWatch says. That isn''t cheap, either, at $4,995 per screen name, but hey, corporate America has deep pockets and is willing to reach into them when sufficiently irritated.

Example: eWatch''s Skinner was quoted by BusinessWeek as saying that "Northwest Airlines used the service earlier this year to help it track down the identities of employees who organized a "sick-out" that nearly halted flights over the Christmas holiday. The company has since fired those employees, and a court has upheld the legality of that action. The ruling is under appeal. Northwest is now using eWatch to help it target -- for re-education -- the most teed-off of its fed-up fliers."

Is this what the Internet is supposed to be all about? I think not.

PR Newswire apparently is a little sensitive about the publicity being given to its new acquisition, and after this article first appeared, I was contacted by a spokesman. Here''s what they said:

eWatch was purchased in January by PR Newswire, and the CyberSleuth product "is what the company used to sell," said Renu Aldrich, Director of Public Relations at PR Newswire, in an e-mail. "Our new eWatch Internet Investigations service is similar, but never has it done anything other than provide a report to the client company...The information online at ewatch.com is somewhat ambiguous and will be changed ASAP."

"We offer several services for companies," Aldrich said. "Most are the clipping/search engine type of service for Usenet groups, message boards, online publications and commercial online services. Our customers use our services to find out about references in online publications, rumors on investor message boards, insider trading, etc. We are simply the mechanism of discovery so that companies do not have to sift through the material themselves. We do not remove postings for them or take any other measures."

Aldrich went on to say that "public companies especially have an obligation to correct false information...They may have to take legal steps to resolve a situation including finding out who is behind the anonymous entity...Companies, shareholders and employees have the right to be protected from defamation online or otherwise. Anti-corporate activists are those that actively seek to defame a company through false information or malicious attacks."