THE EYES HAVE IT

Banks hike Big Brother tactics on their workers

Wall Street banks are amping up their Big Brother powers — hiring hightech surveillance firms that can track nearly every move their employees make, from social media to the dark Web and even irregular ATM activity on their bank accounts, The Post has learned.

The moves by the banks — to protect themselves from stiff fines and to finger potential lawbreakers on the payroll — come as the Department of Justice said this month that it would seek to nail individuals during probes and that banks would be expected to cooperate if they wanted leniency in settlements, sources said.

The privacyfiddling tactics may raise eyebrows among some critics, but it could be this brave new world will become the norm in financial circles.

“It is critical that we balance freedom and flexibility with visibility and governance,” said Prakash Nanduri, chief executive and cofounder of Paxata, a Redwood City, Calif., company whose software draws on data from social media and the dark parts of the Internet. Paxata has seen a recent uptick in demand from banks, Nanduri said.

Until now, regulators have relied mostly on weapons like subpoenas of Bloomberg chats and company emails. And, to be sure, they have worked, helping uncover wrongdoing and leading to more than $74 billion in fines.

But the feds have come under fire — from Congress and others — for not nailing enough individuals responsi ble for the crimes. That led to last week’s memo from Sally Q. Yates, an assistant attorney general in Washington, DC.

“Companies cannot pick and choose which facts to disclose,” Yates wrote in the memo, adding that if companies don’t hand over their employees, including senior execs, investigators will throw the book at the firms.

That change in climate is occurring as banks, looking to get the upper hand over unscrupulous employees, turn to firms like Paxata and Red Owl Analytics and Pal antir, as well as a slew of investigators and law firms who license their proprietary software.

Using these programs, banks are able to monitor in real time their employees’ social media, how often they send emails on personal accounts, withdraw money from ATMs, their comings and goings at work, when they plan private conversations and what they do on the shadowy “deep Web,” where Internet activity isn’t logged like it is on Google.

“[Banks] are held to a higher standard about how to police their own people,” Brian White, chief operating officer at Red Owl, told The Post.

In fact, banks are mimicking their overseers. The Securities and Exchange Commission struck a deal with Palantir last year to sift through huge amounts of data to find unseemly activity.

Palantir, which was founded by Peter Thiel of PayPal fame, didn’t return a request for comment.

“With the ability to monitor employee behavior in real time for anomalies that might indicate risk due to misconduct, companies can be proactive in their fraud investigations and hopefully prevent illegal activity from occurring, or at least prevent its spread,” said Julian Moore, a senior managing partner at K2 Intelligence who had led the federal prosecution of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff.