Witch Hunt at FDNY

Wasting money hunting down whistleblowers:

• FDNY firefighters are fighting the department’s snooping into their personal phone records to hunt the source of news leaks.
  
  Outraged by FDNY tactics — including subpoenaing cellphone records — the Uniformed Fire Officers Association “strongly recommends” that members not give the department their numbers and delete them from their personnel files, The Post has learned.
  
  The department needs cellphone numbers to reach off-duty personnel in a major emergency. But recently it has been searching phone records to check if members called reporters.

We imagine this is about the recent story of an unqualified FDNY recruit being carried throughout training without being able to pass the physical rigors of the process. It's not like the public should expect a firefighter to be able, you know, climb ladders, drag hoses, extinguish fires or anything physically demanding. "Don't worry about the building burning down around your ears - a capable firefighter will be there shortly!" It's not as if anyone would actually die in a smoky stairwell in a County Building because the fire lieutenant was unable to climb to where people had taken refuge against a door, right?

It's been whispered in our ears that McCarthy has been (and continues) doing something similar. We don't doubt it simply because we know that Barb West conducted an illegal First Amendment investigation once already and Dave Harris gave a speech where he said he was going to shut down the blog because it is "detrimental." The Department hasn't acted on the info acquired because they can't justify a legitimate government need to, but supposedly people with a habit of posting here have been denied management transfers to better spots and one has even been dumped from a decent spot.

Be aware that this isn't a New York phenomena.