FDA Spies On Whistle Blowers
U.S. Food and Drug Administration employees are suing the agency because they say their personal e-mail accounts were monitored and they were the targets of retaliation because of their roles as whistleblowers. The staffers claim the spying started after they told lawmakers about safety concerns with medical devices the FDA was approving to screen for cancer.
It all began three years ago — after the FDA found out a group of nine employees wrote a letter to then President-elect Barack Obama explaining the faulty review process for medical devices. The FDA doesn’t require most medical devices to undergo testing on humans before they can be marketed.
The plaintiffs’ lead attorney and executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center, Stephen Kohn, said they cited 20 medical devices, some of which involve ultrasound and CT scan technology. The FDA staffers said those devices could expose patients to radiation up to 800 times that of a chest x-ray. Other devices were intended to detect breast cancer, but the staffers say they were not safe for patients or effective tools. Still, the agency approved 19 of the 20 devices and then went after the whistleblowers.
The plaintiffs had permission to use their work computers for personal purposes, the lawsuit said, according to MSNBC.com. And yet, the FDA monitored Gmail-to-Gmail communications and took screen shots of employees’ computer screens.
“The information secretly obtained by defendants included plaintiffs’ legally protected documents and information that was stored by plaintiffs in folders labeled ‘For Congress’ and other folders that clearly indicated the intent of plaintiffs to raise issues of public concern with appropriate authorities,” according to the Jan. 25 court filing, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.
In addition, the whistleblowers say their jobs and workplace environment have suffered because of their desire to keep the public safe. Of the six who filed the initial suit, only two still work at the FDA, and Kohn says they face continued harassment. Two others were fired, and the remaining two did not have their contracts renewed.
In the meantime, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has demanded answers from FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg. She has until February 17 to explain who authorized the secret monitoring of agency employees and why some are no longer working for the FDA. In addition to being a member of the judiciary committee that helps regulate civil liberties, Grassley has a personal interest because the agency intercepted protected correspondence to and from his Congressional office.
