FDA gets sued for snooping on workers

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AGENCY, the Food and Drug Administration is being sued by staffers who say that it has secretly monitored their personal email and snooped on their whisteblower warnings.

A report at the Washington Post says that the FDA turned its eyes inward after some scientists and doctors warned the US Congress that it was approving medical devices that could harm patients.

Snooping took place over a two year period, according to a complaint filed against the FDA, and saw spooks reading personal emails sent through Google's Gmail service. This information was then used to harass or dismiss workers.

Documents released in the lawsuit show that the FDA began reading emails sent by its staff to the US Congress, snooped on draft versions of whistleblower complaints and looked at documents saved on computers.

The doctors and scientists say that their constitutional rights have been violated because, although they accept that their work communications are open to inspection, their private ones should not be.

"Who would have thought that they would have the nerve to be monitoring my communications to Congress?" said one plaintiff. "How dare they?"

The six scientists and doctors filed their lawsuit against the FDA in the US District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington, DC last week. µ