Sunday Globe Special: FDA Fascism

At this stage it's unfair to the former fascists to make the comparison.

"FDA spied on e-mail of staff involved in safety dispute; Surveillance also of journalists and aides in Congress" by Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane  |  New York Times, July 15, 2012

WASHINGTON — A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists utilized 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.

The TRUTH will NOT BE TOLERATED in this nation!

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.

Moving to quell what one memo called the ‘‘collaboration’’ of the FDA’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, congressional officials, outside medical researchers, and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and ‘‘defamatory’’ information about the agency.

FDA more concerned with THEIR IMAGE than YOUR HEALTH!

The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were ­being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives, and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.  

They were SITTING on YOUR SHOULDER!

The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter, years-long dispute between the scientists and their bosses at the FDA over the scientists’ contention that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed ­patients to dangerous levels of radiation.

A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed ‘‘a substantial and specific danger to public safety.’’

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 website, apparently by mistake, by a private document-handling contractor that works for the FDA. The New York Times reviewed the records and their day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour accounting of the scientists’ communications.  

So it is only PURE LUCK that anyone knows about this?

Congressional staff members who were regarded as sympathetic to the scientists were then cataloged by name in 66 massive directories....  

And those are members of the party!

Last year, the scientists found that a few dozen of their e-mails had been intercepted by the agency. They filed a lawsuit over the issue in September, ­after four of the scientists had been let go, and The Washington Post first disclosed the monitoring in January. But the wide scope of the FDA surveillance operation, its broad range of targets across Washington, and the huge volume of computer information that it generated were not previously known, even to some of the targets.

The FDA defended the surveillance operation in a statement Friday. The computer monitoring ‘‘was consistent with FDA policy,’’ the agency said, and the e-mails ‘‘were collected without regard to the identity of the individuals with whom the user may have been corresponding.’’ The statement did not explain the inclusion of congressional officials, journalists, and others referred to as actors who were in contact with the disaffected scientists.  

This government is un-f***ing-believable.

While federal agencies have broad discretion to monitor their employees’ computer use, the FDA program may have crossed legal lines by grabbing and analyzing confidential infor­mation that is specifically protected under the law, including attorney-client communications, whistle-blower complaints to Congress, and workplace grievances filed with the government.  

This government is above the law!

White House officials were so alarmed to learn of the FDA operation that they sent a governmentwide memo last month from the Office of Management and Budget stressing that while the internal monitoring of ­employee communications was allowed, it could not be used under the law to intimidate whistle-blowers. Any monitoring must be done in ways that ‘‘do not interfere with or chill employees’ use of appropriate channels to disclose wrongdoing,’’ the memo said.

Although some senior FDA officials appear to have been made aware of aspects of the months-long surveillance, the documents do not make clear who at the agency authorized the program or whether it is still in operation.

But members of Congress from both parties were irate to learn that correspondence between the scientists and their own staff members had been gathered and analyzed.  

Oh, I SEE!  They can pass all their Patriot Acts and spying laws for us, but when IT HAPPENS TO THEM it is a DIFFERENT STORY!!

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FLASHBACK:

"Lawsuit says FDA monitored e-mails; Agency workers filed complaints" by Nedra Pickler  |  Associated Press, January 31, 2012

WASHINGTON - Current and former Food and Drug Administration officials say in a lawsuit that the agency secretly monitored their private e-mail after they raised concerns that approved medical devices might risk public safety.

The doctors and scientists who researched the products approached members of Congress and the incoming Obama administration to express alarm that the devices were approved over their objections.

Their lawsuit contends that the agency monitored e-mail sent from their personal Gmail and Yahoo accounts from work computers over two years. It says those e-mails included messages to congressional staff and drafts of whistle-blower complaints.

The staffers say they were legally protected whistle-blowers and the monitoring violated their constitutional rights to free speech and against illegal search and seizure, even though a warning on FDA computers said they had no expectation to privacy. The defendants say they were admonished or lost their contracts with the FDA in retaliation.

The FDA said yesterday it would not comment on ongoing litigation....

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