The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is under fire by Congress for monitoring the personal email accounts of agency scientists, but government-contract records show it’s not the only agency that’s taken steps to spy on its workers.
Government-contract records show that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (V.A.) purchased spy software from the same company that supplied the FDA’s computer monitoring program, according to the database USAspending.gov. A V.A. spokeswoman said the contract was issued in 2008 by a regional division of the Veterans Integrated Service Network that covers parts of six states in the Northeast, but she was not immediately able to say how the program was being used.
