To recap: In January, the Washington Post reported that employees at the Food and Drug Administration were suing the agency over the privacy of their personal e-mail: “The surveillance — detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors [...] 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.” Then, the Post reported that the FDA admitted it accessed employees’ personal e-mail and Congress was investigating the issue. Last month, the Post reported that the Obama administration warned federal agencies about monitoring employees’ e-mail. The administration warned federal agencies “that monitoring their employees’ personal e-mail communications could violate the law if the intent is to retaliate against whistleblowers.“

Now, the New York Times reports that the FDA’s electronic surveillance program was bigger than previously disclosed:

WASHINGTON — A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.

What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort. [...]

F.D.A. officials defended the surveillance operation, saying that the computer monitoring was limited to the five scientists suspected of leaking confidential information about the safety and design of medical devices.

While they acknowledged that the surveillance tracked the communications that the scientists had with Congressional officials, journalists and others, they said it was never intended to impede those communications, but only to determine whether information was being improperly shared. [...]

The documents captured in the surveillance effort — including confidential letters to at least a half-dozen Congressional offices and oversight committees, drafts of legal filings and grievances, and personal e-mails — were posted on a public Web site, apparently by mistake, by a private document-handling contractor that works for the F.D.A. The New York Times reviewed the records and their day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour accounting of the scientists’ communications.

With the documents from the surveillance cataloged in 66 huge directories, many Congressional staff members regarded as sympathetic to the scientists each got their own files containing all their e-mails to or from the whistle-blowers. Drafts and final copies of letters the scientists sent to Mr. Obama about their safety concerns were also included.

Learn more details in the full article.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2012 and is filed under Anonymity, Civil liberties, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Identification, Security, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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