I've had some experience at a corporate security team at a fairly large (non-tech) firm, including internal and external investigations, and I can confirm I never saw or heard of anything remotely like this. Any time we did any sort of research into a non-employee (which was very rare), it was because they were explicitly making threats, or because we received reports from employees that someone was directly harassing them.

And typically it was just to gather information to provide to law enforcement, when necessary, and to provide information to our physical security team when we thought there may be some increased risk of a belligerent person trying to come to our premises. Very definitely not to take matters into our own hands and act like a dystopian quasi-paramilitary cabal terrorizing random people with obsessive psychological warfare campaigns. It was the total opposite; we were constantly walking on eggshells to do as little as possible and to defer as much as possible to law enforcement, as we should've been.

Never once did I see the slightest inkling of a desire to go after critics of the company from anyone on our team or from management. We would get some visibility into that from dashboards showing mentions of the company on social media and stuff like that, but we'd just ignore or occasionally chuckle at (or agree with...) any criticism we saw.

I'd like to think this hyper-paranoid, authoritarian, power-tripping attitude (let alone the abject psychopathy and psychosis) isn't too common in corporate security teams, but I have no clue and only have my n = 1 sample to go off of. And maybe the distribution is different for tech companies dedicated to rapid growth/monopolization, compared to more traditional, "boring" companies.