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And you thought the CIA was the only agency that knew how to pick the lock on your email account

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Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to the Obama Administration asking to have employee-snooping allegations by the Food and Drug Administration looked into. Earlier this year, six whistle-blowing, ex-FDA employees filed suit against their former employer after they discovered the agency had been monitoring their work email accounts. This happens all the time in the workplace, but the thing that has the two congressmen worked up is that the FDA were poking around personal Gmail and Yahoo accounts of the employees too. The lawsuit filed by the ex-FDA employees alleges that the agency snooped around their work computers, looking for passwords to their personal accounts. In a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, they write: “we request that OMB conduct a comprehensive survey of all federal agencies to determine agencies’ policies with respect monitoring federal employees’ personal e-mail accounts.” If the FDA can find a password and log into personal email accounts, who’s to say FEMA or the Senate or the Federal Reserve can’t do the same. Acting purely on a gut feeling and a few wispy shreds of a hunch, I’m pretty sure Tim Geithner has been logging into my hotmail account looking for clues as to when he should raise interest rates.

 

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