[ISN] FDA staffers sue agency over surveillance of personal e-mail

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fda-staffers-sue-agency-over-surveillance-of-personal-e-mail/2012/01/23/gIQAj34DbQ_story.html

By Ellen Nakashima and Lisa Rein
The Washington Post
January 29, 2012

The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail 
of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress 
that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed 
unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.

The surveillance — detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the 
scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. 
District Court in Washington last week — took place over two years as 
the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government 
computers.

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.

[...]


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