"Quality Associates" Indeed

A small note tonight...

I was reading this article in the NYTimes today about how some contractor for the FDA fucked up and posted 80,000 pages of silent monitoring online.  Unfortunately for the FDA, a significant part of that surveillance may be illegal.  Worse, they don't even have "good faith" to back them up as they fired the employees monitored after giving them permission to use the monitored equipment for personal purposes.

There are lots of implications in this case, but here's where I find things get fun.  The NYTimes was oddly specific about how they found the documents.  My first Google search landed me some results.  :)

Search: Julian Nicholas m.d. fda
Page 2 of Google yields fruit:

That link looks juicy... A consulting firm with an FTP site that's indexed Excel files (generally you do NOT want these indexed).
Let's take a bite.

Shit.  Requires a username and password.  Well, the Times did say it was "taken down."  As always though, check Google!  The cache, that is; if it's showing in results it means Google has or had access.  This is my favorite way of passing paywalls on content BTW.
Click the "View as HTML" link from Google and...

Bingo!
See those file names?  Cruzer is a brand of portable flash drive, or USB thumb drive.  These were files Dr. Julian Nicholas likely had on a personal flash drive that he plugged into his work computer at some point.

Better than that, there are more to be found.  Adding "site:qualityassociatesinc.com" limits our Google results to those from the qualityassociatesinc.com domain.  Google shows 18 results for "Julian Nicholas m.d. fda site:qualityassociatesinc.com."

I can't wait until someone comes out of the woodwork with these documents.  I plan on having a feast.

The FDA.  Quality associates indeed.