Lawmakers want survey of agencies’ policies for monitoring personal e-mail

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From Federal Daily:

Two key members of Congress have asked the administration to conduct a survey of federal agencies’ guidelines for monitoring employees’ personal e-mail accounts.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, are seeking the information as a result of their investigation of alleged acts of retaliation by the Food and Drug Administration against nine whistleblowers.

Six of the whistleblowers—FDA doctors and scientists who informed Congress of concerns over FDA’s process for approving medical devices—filed a lawsuit in federal court in January alleging that the FDA used information it had collected through secret surveillance to fire, harass or pass them over, noted a press release from Grassley's office.

In a March 5 letter to Office of Management and Budget acting Director Jeffrey Zients, the lawmakers said the FDA “may have intercepted passwords to the personal e-mail accounts of its employees for the purpose of logging in to search for archived messages to and from Congress and the Office of Special Counsel.”

The lawmakers said that based on the issues raised by the FDA investigation, they are asking OMB to conduct a “comprehensive survey” of the policies and practices for electronic surveillance at other federal agencies.

While the FDA admitted to monitoring the accounts, the lawmakers said, the agency also obtained confidential emails between the whistleblowers and Congress sent prior to the time that the monitoring allegedly occurred. And that, the members said, begs the question about how the agency obtained the prior emails.

“The FDA specifically targeted these employees for monitoring after they contacted the Presidential transition team and Congress to blow the whistle,” Grassley and Issa wrote. “Therefore, the FDA’s purpose for conducting surveillance was unlawful, because retaliation against individuals who engaged in protected forms of whistleblowing is illegal.”

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CFSO Note: CFSO has documented cases of DS using State intranet interfaces to obtain passwords to personal Yahoo and other accounts, which DS accesses looking for derogatory information. Accessing such personal accounts on State intranet is not safe and is performed at risk.