FDA Spied On Emails To Try To Silence Critics

by Mike Masnick

We've discussed how the government often seems much more focused on silencing leaks of information, rather than recognizing that those leaks are often highlighting serious misconduct. The latest example involves the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who apparently started trying to find the source of a leak, but in the end started collecting thousands of emails to try to stifle all sorts of criticism of the FDA, as revealed by the NY Times over the weekend.

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 memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’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.

The details show that the FDA installed key logger software on the computers of their own scientists, tracked the personal emails they wrote to others, and tracked documents they copied to key drives. Now, you can make a reasonable argument that since these were work laptops, the FDA has every right to track the usage, but it seems pretty clear that the FDA went really far here, and it wasn't just about stopping leaks, but about trying to stifle criticism and whistleblowing.

In fact, much of the evidence suggests that this absolutely was an attempt to blow the whistle on faulty review procedures by the FDA, that resulted in the approval of medical imaging devices that weren't actually safe. And, apparently, the complaints by the whistleblowers were convincing enough that there's now a Congressional investigation into "a substantial and specific danger to public safety" from this activity.

If the FDA were functioning as it was supposed to, it would have seen these complaints as a reason to investigate its own activities. Instead, in the supposed attempt to "stop leaks," the FDA used this info to try to squelch the attempt to have its own practices investigated.

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