The Spy Hunt for Whistle-Blowers
The intensity and sweep of the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to spy on the communications of whistle-blowing employees suspected of leaking trade secrets to outsiders were astonishing. What started as an effort to monitor the e-mails of a single individual quickly grew to encompass five employees and their communications with other F.D.A. workers, journalists, Congressional staff members and two government offices that investigate allegations raised by whistle-blowers on what is supposed to be a confidential basis.
As Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane reported in The Times last week, the F.D.A. used so-called spy software that captured screen images from the government-issued laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The automated surveillance generated more than 80,000 pages of computer documents and e-mails that were inadvertently posted on a public Web site.
The surveillance began on April 22, 2010, after GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric, requested an investigation of how information that it considered a trade secret had ended up in The New York Times on March 29, 2010. That article focused primarily on allegations about unwarranted radiation risks posed by a CT machine made by General Electric to screen patients for colon cancer; it quoted two of the whistle-blowers who would later come under surveillance and be let go.
All told, the whistle-blowers contend that a dozen major medical devices were approved or pushed toward approval by supervisors who overruled their concerns about safety and then terminated or reprimanded them for taking their case to outside authorities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/opinion/the-spy-hunt-for-whistle-blowers.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120723
