FDA lawyers authorized spying on agency’s employees, senator says - Basketball Forum : Professional and College Basketball Forums

**Prince** · 07-17-2012, 12:44 AM

Quote:

Congressional investigators said Monday that the chief counsel’s office at the Food and Drug Administration authorized wide-ranging surveillance of a group of the agency’s scientists, the first indication that the effort was sanctioned at the highest levels.

In a letter to the FDA, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said that his staff had learned that the spying was “explicitly authorized, in writing” by the agency’s top legal office.

“The FDA’s actions represent serious impediments to the right of agency employees to make protected disclosures about waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, or public safety,” wrote Grassley, who demanded that the agency release a copy of the memo authorizing the surveillance and the name of the FDA official who requested it.

FDA spokeswoman Erica Jefferson said that the agency is looking into the matter. She said that the surveillance was limited in scope and reiterated that it was relegated to government computers. “We did not impede or interfere with any employee communication to Congress, their staff, media or federal investigators,” she said.

The disclosure marked the latest turn in an investigation of the FDA’s past efforts to monitor the communications of a group of its doctors who were expressing concerns about the safety of medical devices. As part of the effort, the FDA secretly collected thousands of private e-mails that the employees sent to one another, members of Congress, journalists, lawyers and others.

The FDA acknowledged Friday that targeted surveillance of five employees began in mid-2010, but it said that was not ongoing today, according to a letter sent to Grassley by Jeanne Ireland, the agency’s assistant commissioner for litigation. The FDA said Monday that the computer surveillance was limited to five employees. But an internal document shows that the agency targeted at least seven employees beginning in 2010.

The targeting of the employees’ communications, including e-mail and other online activities, was reported by The Washington Post in January. The agency monitored personal e-mail accounts accessed from government computers, took electronic snapshots of computer desktops and reviewed documents saved on hard drives.

The New York Times reported over the weekend that the scope of the surveillance was wider than first suspected, with the agency creating a database of 80,000 pages of computer documents collected from the scientists’ communications.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...y.html?hpid=z1

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