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.'”
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Very little of "my story" has become public yet, but I'm hoping it will be. So far, my local TV station channel 13 Q13 News has done the best, most detailed story so far about my story. I have always believed (and said so both privately to Boeing management and in the noted broadcast) that "my" story of corruption at Boeing and the FAA that places the public at unknown (unknown levels of, because it was the in-process and final inspections of Boeing airplanes that were never done, or just partially done, to add illegally to Boeing's bottom line, and also "unknown" because Boeing and the FAA chose to never tell the public for obvious reasons) extra risk in return for more bottom line dollars for Boeing is a bigger story than that of Enron's corruption. Right now Boeing is doing their best to retaliate against me, but it is not that internal corruption driven reprisal that concerns me the most. It is still the urgent restoration of some even minimally effective level of oversight by the FAA to stop Boeing's current wholesale violation of quality, safety, and reliability assurance processes for short term profit gains that is my main concern. Even though I have been "evicted" by Boeing from my critical job there as a QA inspector, and can no longer attempt to be perhaps the last true inspector on the assembly lines at Boeing that still tried to do my critical job instead of simply just pretending to do it and then stamping the paper stating that I did actually inspect the work (as so many of my fellow inspectors did, and still do), I can still attempt to right the immense wrongs going on on the Commercial Aircraft production lines at Boeingfrom the outside by seeking reforms of the true source of Boeing's current corruption--the FAA, that perverts the true meaning of their jobs of "overseeing the production of conforming and safe commercial aircraft on Boeing's production lines," to mean that they are to "overlook the production of nonconforming and unknown whether to be safe commercial aircraft on Boeing's production lines."
I have written a letter to the Department of Transportation's Inspector General Todd J. Zinser requesting that his office investigate and correct this intentional "oversight" of Boeing's corruption that lets airplanes that were never obviously properly inspected receive a Certificate of Airworthiness rollerstamped (similar to the way Boeing's production paperwork is) by an equally corrupt FAA. Please go to my website, http://www.thelastinspector.com, for more details and for links to write Inspector General Zinser and your Congressional representatives requesting that Inspector General Zinser (and other government agencies as appropriate--such as the FBI) begin my requested investigation at the earliest possible time. The life you save by doing so may be your life, or the life of a loved one.
Thanks,
Gerald Eastman