WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of its scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.
The surveillance — detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week — took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.
Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes.
Copies of the e-mails show that starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistle-blower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees’ and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.
FDA computers post a warning, visible when users log on, that they should have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in any data passing through or stored on the system, and that the government may intercept any such data at any time for any lawful government purpose.
But in the suit, the doctors and scientists say the government violated their constitutional privacy rights by gazing into personal e-mail accounts for the purpose of monitoring activity that they say was lawful.
“Who would have thought that they would have the nerve to be monitoring my communications to Congress?” said Robert C. Smith, a plaintiff in the suit and a former radiology professor at Yale and Cornell universities who worked as a device reviewer at the FDA until his contract was not renewed in July 2010.
An FDA spokeswoman said Monday the agency does not comment on ongoing litigation.
But according to FDA internal documents that the scientists and doctors obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the agency told the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general that they had improperly disclosed confidential business information about the devices. The agency requested that an investigation be opened in May 2010.
The scientists and doctors denied sharing information improperly. The HHS inspector general’s office, which oversees FDA operations, declined to pursue an investigation, finding no evidence of criminal conduct. It also said that the doctors and scientists had a legal right to air their concerns to Congress or journalists.
FDA officials sought a second time that year to initiate action against the scientists and doctors.
“We have obtained new information confirming the existence of information disclosures that undermine the integrity and mission of the FDA and, we believe, may be prohibited by law,” wrote Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, on June 28, 2010.
The inspector general, after consulting with federal prosecutors, declined the second request.
Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who is now a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, said the FDA’s warning on its computers gave the agency latitude to conduct extensive monitoring.
Yet the case sheds light on the lengths to which a federal agency will go to monitor employees. At issue, experts say, is whether the purpose of the monitoring was legal and what level of monitoring on government computers is reasonable at a time when technology increasingly blurs the lines between work and home.
“The FDA has a huge responsibility to protect public health and safety,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement last week. “It’s hard to see how managers apparently thought it was a good use of time to shadow agency scientists and monitor their e-mail accounts for legally protected communications with Congress.”
