Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the job title of an agency official. Jeanne Ireland is the assistant commissioner for legislation, not litigation. This version has been updated.
Congressional investigators said Monday that the chief counsel’s office at the Food and Drug Administration authorized wide-ranging surveillance of a group of the agency’s scientists, the first indication that the effort was sanctioned at the highest levels.
In a letter to the FDA, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said that his staff had learned that the spying was “explicitly authorized, in writing” by the agency’s top legal office.
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“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
“The FDA’s actions represent serious impediments to the right of agency employees to make protected disclosures about waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, or public safety,” wrote Grassley, who demanded that the agency release a copy of the memo authorizing the surveillance and the name of the FDA official who requested it.
FDA spokeswoman Erica Jefferson said that the agency is looking into the matter. She said that the surveillance was limited in scope and reiterated that it was relegated to government computers. “We did not impede or interfere with any employee communication to Congress, their staff, media or federal investigators,” she said.
The disclosure marked the latest turn in an investigation of the FDA’s past efforts to monitor the communications of a group of its doctors who were expressing concerns about the safety of medical devices. As part of the effort, the FDA secretly collected thousands of private e-mails that the employees sent to one another, members of Congress, journalists, lawyers and others.
The FDA acknowledged Friday that targeted surveillance of five employees began in mid-2010, but it said that was not ongoing today, according to a letter sent to Grassley by Jeanne Ireland, the agency’s assistant commissioner for legislation. The FDA said Monday that the computer surveillance was limited to five employees. But an internal document shows that the agency targeted at least seven employees beginning in 2010.
The targeting of the employees’ communications, including e-mail and other online activities, was reported by The Washington Post in January. The agency monitored personal e-mail accounts accessed from government computers, took electronic snapshots of computer desktops and reviewed documents saved on hard drives.
The New York Times reported over the weekend that the scope of the surveillance was wider than first suspected, with the agency creating a database of 80,000 pages of computer documents collected from the scientists’ communications.
The database, apparently posted inadvertently online by an FDA contractor, included an FDA “scoping” document of targets for future e-mail interception that included congressional staff members. Also captured were draft complaints being prepared by the scientists to the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency that investigates disclosures of government wrongdoing and retaliation against those who report it.
The OSC is investigating the FDA’s monitoring of its employees.
In June, OSC special counsel Carolyn Lerner warned federal agencies that monitoring their employees’ personal e-mail violated the law if the intent was to retaliate against whistleblowers. The White House distributed her warning to agencies across the government, an acknowledgment by the Obama administration that there are limits to employee surveillance.
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