Florida police raid home of former state Covid-19 data scientist

Politics & Elections
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This could go in the Virus forum, but it is a mite political.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement executed a search warrant Monday morning at the home of data scientist Rebekah Jones, who was fired by the state Department of Health in May. The agency is investigating whether Jones accessed a state government messaging system without authorization to urge employees to speak out about coronavirus deaths, according to an affidavit by an agent working on the case.

OK, they need to check up on that, i can see that. Maybe.

About 10 officers with guns drawn showed up to her Tallahassee home around 8:30 a.m., Jones said. A video taken from a camera in her house, which she posted… on social media, showed an officer pointing a gun up a stairwell as Jones told him her two children were upstairs. Jones said that the officer was pointing his gun at her 2-year-old daughter, 11-year-old son and her husband, who she said were in the stairwell, although the video doesn’t make that clear.

Why the holy fuck does a minor white collar crime need ten, count 'em 10, armed police?

She isnt being investigated for a violent crime or anything. This is simply bullying.

Jones said she believed the raid on her home was orchestrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who she’s publicly accused of mishandling the pandemic.

“This is what happens when you challenge powerful and corrupt people,” Jones said. “If he thinks this is going to scare me into silence, he’s wrong.”

Right.

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You gotta watch out for those 2 year olds…

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They are tricky, might have flung poo.

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Is there a link about the actual raid? Are their charges against Jones yet? I hope a great lawyer agrees to represent her pro bono.

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Thanks!

It sure sounds like this was more a threat to shut up than an actual investigation. Bet she’s never even charged.

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I thought I put a link in my OP, my apologies.

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They actually can cause a lot of damage when swung with sufficient force.

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This makes things look much better for the government.

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That appears to be the opinion of one of the lawyers appointed by the Governor:

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Here’s a link that contains the tweet which shows the resignation letter. No paywall.

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Another angle I haven’t seen mentioned yet in either this thread or the Pit thread: After she was fired, she continued, or may have continued, to be in contact with employees at the agency, who may have been feeding information to her. Jones and Filipkowski suggest that the cops seized all her equipment in order to do forensic study to determine who at the agency has been talking to her. They will come for those people next.

From the WaPo article:

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Worth reading this AP article as to why she was originally fired.

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IP addresses are more or less worthless and the Judge either was biased or doesnt know much computer science:

“It is well known that IP addresses can be spoofed. In other words, I can make an IP or I can make it look as though Internet traffic is coming from somewhere else,” said Kevin Butler, associate director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research and a professor of computer science at the University of Florida. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the country’s leading internet civil liberties and data privacy advocacy group, in 2016 published a 22-page white paper laying out why IP addresses on their own are unreliable personal identifiers, and are commonly misused or misunderstood by police and the courts. A key reason is that information can often relay through multiple IP addresses.

*“It’s a thin read to just use the IP address, and it’s one that we really, really discourage,” said Cindy Cohn, the EFF’s executive director. "An IP address is nothing, is not even remotely like a fingerprint… the reason that we worry about IP addresses is the cops will often pretend like they’re a fingerprint."Butler, at the University of Florida, said making an IP address that appears to come from elsewhere isn’t that complicated. *

“These types of attacks are things that, you know, my students in my undergraduate security class are aware of how to do,” he said. …Lewis, the former cybercrimes investigator, also questioned why authorities seized thumb drives and memory cards to investigate accessing an online messaging system. “The only things I think that you would have had probable causes to seize would be the router and the computers” as well as the modem. Jones’ router and modem weren’t seized.

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Cross-posting this because IMO it seems important:

Hey; guess what just happened?

It seems kind of odd that today’s article doesn’t even mention the armed raid to seize her laptop that took place just 6 months ago.

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From the article above:

“Whistleblower status doesn’t substantiate any claims. It simply provides confidentiality, and means someone made a complaint,” the governor’s spokesperson, Taryn Fenske, told the Herald.

So far, not one of her claims has been substantiated.