FDA whistleblowers sue agency for reading their personal e-mails
WHAT HEELS: Six whistleblowing scientists and doctors working for the Food and Drug Administration, are suing the agency for surreptitiously monitoring personal E-mails accessed from government computers for two years after they warned Congress that least a dozen radiological devices they thought were risky were on track to to be approved, The Washington Post reports:
Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes.
Copies of the e-mails show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers. …
[T]he case sheds light on the lengths to which a federal agency will go to monitor employees. At issue, experts say, is whether the purpose of the monitoring was legal and what level of monitoring on government computers is reasonable at a time when technology increasingly blurs the lines between work and home.
“The FDA has a huge responsibility to protect public health and safety,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement last week. “It’s hard to see how managers apparently thought it was a good use of time to shadow agency scientists and monitor their e-mail accounts for legally protected communications with Congress.”
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