Posted on 07/15/2012 6:07:37 AM PDT by John W
WASHINGTON — A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration 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.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Gee whiz; *govt spying*. That’s a new idea.
Not under President Transparency it’s not.
I forgot the </sarcasm> tag...
When I logon to my computer at work, I have to acknowledge that the company reserves the right to monitor everything I do on it and that there is no expectation of privacy on company computers.
My choice: their way or the highway. I can see the same thing with any government agency’s computers. If you want to write your congressman, do it on your own computer, on your own time.
While I very much appreciate the whistleblower scientist’s efforts to protect the public with their disclosures...you would think they’ed be smart enough not to do their secret “disclosing” using gubment computers.
“If you want to write your congressman, do it on your own computer, on your own time.”
Even that will not prevent someone from being fired. I know first hand a person who was fired because they used their own PC/E-Mail account to handle customer communication in the evening or when the totally inept IT department could not keep the servers up.
The IT dept. falling back on recent (at that time) federal legislation demanded that any communication only go through the company servers. Great until a customer is down and they need some replacement equipment immediately and the only method is an employee’s own PC and e-mail account.
Like many IT departments this one felt the company and the employees existed to serve IT and not the other way around.
The margins on these generic injectables is so thin that many manufacturers have elected to discontinue production.
Hello government-produced shortages.
Interesting to note where the limited FDA resources are being focused.
And, I think you can be fairly fired for any activity that is embarassing or inconvenient for your employer, whether or not it directly affects you job. If you work for a defense contractor, don't testify before Congress how screwed up the Navy is, for instance.
Meanwhile, employees drift back and forth between the FDA and the big pharmaceutical companies in as incestuous a fashion as you could ever design.
” He was conducting company business that might result in financial loss, embarassment, litigation or legal claims, and doing it outside of approved company channels, thereby bypassing safeguards and oversight.”
If he followed company procedure, the customer would have been down until late the following day or over the weekend but the IT people would be quite happy.
When you deal with multi million or billion dollar a year companies they do not want to hear that they cannot get their equipment running again until it is on the IT schedule.
Some people actually do care about their customers and are willing to help on their own time. Go figure it was a large electrical distribution company owned by the French cheese eating surrender monkeys.
As far as being “embarrassing or inconvenient for the employer”, exactly the opposite was the case. The employer would have suffered the embarrassment of an upset customer along with the possible loss of business.
bttt
Remember when the Clintons imposed vaccine shortages?
Whenever I log into a computer at work, I have to click “Okay” on a disclaimer that I acknowledge that anything I do on that computer is subject to monitoring.
A few months ago, I was worried that I might have picked up a virus somewhere, because of something odd my computer did. I called the IT department. They assured me that they would have known right away if I’d gotten a virus.
We’re not allowed to use personal email at work. We are allowed to shop (within reason—no spending all day on eBay). If a government employee does something they shouldn’t do on a government computer, it’s not like they weren’t warned—we’re reminded fairly frequently what we can and can’t do with those computers.
Indeed - good point - i need to go back and gather stuff on that. Socialism and Shortages.
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