A hard-hitting New York Times article from Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane revealed:



A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] 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.

Taking a page out of the intelligence community's surveillance handbook, the FDA engaged in widespread, surreptitious monitoring of whistleblowers' legally-protected disclosures to Congress and the media.

The monitoring is eerily similar to that of National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake, except that it occurred at the FDA and not an intelligence agency. The FDA spied on employees, reporters, and congressional staffers in an attempt to target several scientist-whistleblowers who raised concerns about excessive radiation emitted from mammogram and colonoscopy machines.

Many of the communications intercepted are protected whistleblowing disclosures, the Times reported:

. . . the F.D.A. 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.

Like Drake's case, the whistleblowers went through proper channels (such as to Congress), and the government took those protected whistleblowing communications and used them against the whistleblowers. Half a dozen whistleblowers were fired and are suing, and the Office of Special Counsel -- the federal agency that handles whistleblower disclosures -- found the whistleblowers' disclosures worthy of investigation.

Thankfully Lichtblau is back on the surveillance beat and he and Shane (who also covered the Drake case early on) were able to investigate the FDA's spy program.

