October 3, 2014 by Brad Perriello
A federal judge in Washington tosses a lawsuit filed by FDA whistleblowers who accused the agency of conducting secret surveillance of their private email accounts.
A federal judge last week tossed a lawsuit brought by 6 of the so-called “FDA 9” whistleblowers accusing the government of violating their constitutional rights with surveillance of their private email accounts.
The staffers alleged that the FDA spied on the private email accounts they accessed using their government-issued computers, after they warned Congress and the president that unsafe medical devices were being allowed onto the U.S. market.
The lawsuit, filed in 2011 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, leveled 12 counts against the agency, its chief Dr. Margaret Hamburg, medical device chief Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, the Dept. of Health & Human Services and its then-head, Kathleen Sebelius, and other government officials. It accused them of enacting the secret surveillance after learning of a letter the staffers sent to then-President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team Jan. 7, 2009, and of using the information gleaned from the tapped email accounts to harass and, in some cases, fire the whistleblowers.
