Aerospace giant Boeing has fired an employee suspected of leaking internal documents to a business reporter at the Seattle Times who has used the information to write stories about the company, according to the Seattle Weekly.
Chuck Taylor wrote, “Why are two daily newspapers better than one? Because had The Seattle Times been our only local option, we might never have learned that a Boeing employee had been arrested and then fired last month for allegedly leaking proprietary information from computer files— apparently to the Times.
“Reported the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Saturday, June 10, in an article by aerospace reporter James Wallace: ‘For more than a year, Boeing has been quietly trying to determine the source of leaks to The Seattle Times, which has published a number of Boeing-related stories that cited ‘internal Boeing documents.” Wallace has been known to take advantage of ‘internal Boeing documents’ himself, so it must have been kind of weird to call Times business editor Becky Bisbee and aerospace reporter Dominic Gates for comment. They declined, of course.
“The Boeing employee, Gerald Eastman, confirmed for the P-I that he’d been fired, but he would neither confirm nor deny a relationship with the Times. He told the P-I he was fired from his job in the propulsion unit in Kent as retaliation for blowing the whistle a few years back on what the Federal Aviation Administration described for the P-I as ‘procedural non-compliance.’ So far, the Times has been silent on the matter, in print and otherwise. Managing Editor David Boardman told us: ‘We don’t comment on who our sources might or might not be.'”
