"Ars Technica: Jon Brodkin" <jon.brodkin@arstechnica.com>

The Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.

The surveillance — detailed in e-mails and memos unearthed by six of the scientists and doctors, who filed a lawsuit against the FDA in U.S. District Court in Washington last week — took place over two years as the plaintiffs accessed their personal Gmail accounts from government computers.

Information garnered this way eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the suit alleges. All had worked in an office responsible for reviewing devices for cancer screening and other purposes.

Copies of the e-mails show that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints complete with editing notes in the margins. The agency also took electronic snapshots of the computer desktops of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers.

#FDA staffers sue agency over surveillance of personal e-mail--to Congress #whistleblower

In twenty-first-century America, “rights” are increasingly meant for those who behave themselves and don’t exercise them. And if you happen to be part of a government in which no criminal act of state -- torture, kidnapping, the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, the launching of wars of aggression -- will ever bring a miscreant to court, only two crimes evidently exist: blowing a whistle or expressing your opinion. State Department official Peter Van Buren, whose new book about a disastrous year he spent in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, is a must read, learned that the hard way. So did Morris Davis. So may we all. Tom

RT @FearLoathingBTX: Office of Special Counsel Fights for Fired #FDA #Whistleblower Paul Hardy #bioethics

Sanchez came forward last month at a gathering sponsored by the Advisory Committee on Transparency, an open-government group in Washington, D.C., claiming that the Port Angeles Border Patrol office was a “black hole” with “no mission, no purpose” for the more than 40 agents — 10 times the number it had in 2006 — who patrol Clallam and Jefferson counties.

"Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy." http://t.co/TsN0N6N

Globaleaks behauptet nach einer Analyse diverser Systeme in seinem LeakDirectory, die bisherigen Whistleblower-Systeme seien nicht sicher: "The existing software lacked basic privacy-aware (anonymity) and security features (encryption)" (Slide 6/45). Ich frage mich, wie man zu dieser Aussage kommen kann, ...

Bitte auf der Website weiterlesen.

Globaleaks behauptet nach einer Analyse diverser Systeme in seinem LeakDirectory, die bisherigen Whistleblower-Systeme seien nicht sicher: "The existing software lacked basic privacy-aware (anonymity) and security features (encryption)" (Slide 6/45). Ich frage mich, wie man zu dieser Aussage kommen kann, ...

Bitte auf der Website weiterlesen.

Mal wieder ist WikiLeaks in aller Munde. Mal wieder ist Julian Assange auf den Titelblättern. Die Massenmedien vermelden das Ende eines revolutionären Projekts, besingen den Untergang eines Anti-Helden. Dabei zeigt die jüngste Episode um die Leaking-Plattform vor allem eins: ...

Bitte auf der Website weiterlesen.

Mal wieder ist WikiLeaks in aller Munde. Mal wieder ist Julian Assange auf den Titelblättern. Die Massenmedien vermelden das Ende eines revolutionären Projekts, besingen den Untergang eines Anti-Helden. Dabei zeigt die jüngste Episode um die Leaking-Plattform vor allem eins: ...

Bitte auf der Website weiterlesen.

A row has broken out between Wikileaks and one of the newspapers it collaborated with to leak US diplomatic cables. The whistle-blowing group said unredacted versions of the 251,000 diplomatic cables had been leaked on the internet. Wikileaks blamed the disclosure on the Guardian newspaper and said it had started legal action against the paper. The newspaper has strongly denied the claims, blaming a "security breach". In a short statement on Twitter, Wikileaks said: "A Guardian journalist has, in a previously undetected act of gross negligence or malice... disclosed top secret decryption passwords to the entire, unredacted, Wikileaks Cablegate archive.

While we might pay attention to a damaged piece of machinery or a chemical spill we often overlook the non physical risks in a workplace. But while bullying and harassment may not be as visible, they are just as dangerous as the risks we can see. A productivity commission report in 2010 found that even though bullying and harassment tend to be more costly on average than claims for most types of physical injury they are given less attention (by both legislation and employers).<br />
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The same report estimates of the annual cost of workplace bullying to employers and the economy in Australia ranged from $6 billion to $36 billion. That equates to 3% of Australia's GDP and if bullying is prevalent in your business then it will be costing you a lot more than you think. Bullying doesn't just affect the person being bullied, but their families, the people they work with and if they leave their job the (poor) person who replaces them.