According to the New York Times, FDA collected more than 75,000 employee e-mails in an effort to identify leaks of confidential trade secret information. At some point, a narrow, possibly legitimate inquiry into a handful of scientists at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) turned into a massive e-mail surveillance of selected individuals and their contacts.
So far, FDA is not contrite. FDA’s position, while still not quite official, appears to be: we tried to accommodate these individuals’ complaints within the personnel and dispute resolution systems. We had legitimate concerns that trade secrets were leaving FDA in their correspondence with third parties.