(LEGAFI) -- The Food and Drug Administration has become the target of a Congressional investigation following a whistleblower lawsuit accusing the agency of secretly monitoring the personal email of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients.

The six staffers allege in the FDA whistleblower lawsuit that the surveillance took place over two years as they accessed personal Gmail accounts from government computers. The six scientists and doctors unearthed emails and memos showing that, starting in January 2009, the FDA intercepted communications with congressional staffers and draft versions of whistleblower complaints. The FDA also took snapshots of the computer desktop of the FDA employees and reviewed documents they saved on the hard drives of their government computers, CBS News reports.

The information garnered from the surveillance eventually contributed to the harassment or dismissal of all six of the FDA employees, the whistleblower lawsuit alleges.

"The FDA went far beyond ‘routine monitoring.’ They unconstitutionally targeted one group of employees simply because they had the guts to speak up about misconduct,” said Stephen M. Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center and attorney for the six FDA whistleblowers. “The FDA cannot use unconstitutional tactics to enforce an otherwise neutral employee surveillance policy.”

FDA computers post a warning, visible when users log on, that have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when they use work computers to transmit or store data, and that the government may intercept any such data at any time for any lawful government purpose.

According to the FDA whistleblower lawsuit, however, the government violated the staffers’ constitutional privacy rights by looking into their personal email accounts for the purpose of monitoring activity that they say was lawful.

"Targeted monitoring has a devastating chilling effect on all public employees, strangling the ability of the American public and Congress to learn about misconduct and corruption in the federal government,” said Kohn.

Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) launched an investigation in response to the FDA whistleblower lawsuit last week.