The FDA Spied On Its Own Scientists

retroworks writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about efforts by the Food and Drug Administration to locate a source of 'leaks' within the agency. The search became a slippery slope involving trojans, keyloggers, screenshot captures, and an investigation that eventually became an allegory for management overkill. The article describes how the investigation of one employee expanded to five, and how the investigation of five led to other staff (including the interception of correspondence to President Obama). The Agency struggled with the gray area between protecting trade secrets of drug companies (which had applied for FDA approval) and censoring researchers with legitimate questions about the Agency's approval process."

Comments

This is understandable

[tryptogryphic]

I don't think there is anything shocking about this, especially given the technological climate of the current era when it comes to information systems, data security and patents etc. The tricky part is the managing the human resource of such an operation and dealing with he seemingly infinite intellectual nuances of the human psyche involved in such an operation, at a level like this.

I am prepared to see more and more of these kinds of operations surface, and I am glad to see this kind of quality control is taking place within an organization that is in charge of something as crucial as what they are indeed in charge of securing. The title of this story entry is misleading with it's use of the word 'spied', to me this is just good management / quality control in the information age. When you work for a government agency, there's no way in hell you can expect your activities not to be monitored, especially when you're using government property to perform them.