Rebecca Jones, who was fired after armed state police raided her home on Monday morning, was fired after she was accused of undermining state data on the administration of government Ron Descentis and epidemic mitigation, which attracted national attention. State authorities are investigating whether she accessed a government messaging system without permission to send messages urging former colleagues to talk about coronavirus deaths.
Jones has refused to send a message, but told CNN that she could expose her resources to the government in retaliation for the computers and phones seized from her Talasi home.
Jones was fired from the state health department in May. She claims she was terminated for refusing to manipulate coronavirus data, but state officials have said she is adamant and has not consulted epidemiologists.
After her firing, she emerged as a public critic of the Densentis administration’s approach to the epidemic, blasting the governor and publishing her own dashboard of coronavirus states. Jones said he has received various internal records of people working for the state, in which he said there is evidence that state officials “lie in January about things like CDC internal reports and notices.”
That evidence was on a “set of flash drives” that officers took when they raided his home, he said. Jones, who was not arrested or charged, also had documents that he entered legally when he was a state employee.
Now, Legal experts say the material could theoretically be used if Jones’ sources violated rules about sharing insider information. The search warrant warrants the authorities to recover “any and all computer devices” that store or transmit data, including hard drives, devices, software and correspondence, including the capture, receipt of data associated with the facilitation of computer crime offenses. , Related to origin or distribution. ”
“The warrant was extremely comprehensive,” Jones’s attorney, Lawrence Walters, told CNN. “We would hope that this is a targeted investigation to find out what they are looking for. … If their true purpose is to investigate all of her personal communications and her sources, it shows that this is abusive and defamatory.”
Still, he said, “We can’t stop them from seeing what they have.”
A spokesman for the state’s law enforcement department said agents are currently only investigating Jones but analyzing the evidence.
Spokesman Great Plessinger said: “At the moment we are only investigating for his cybercrime. If we receive other information about other crimes or it leads to another suspect, we will obviously follow up on it.”
Why Jones ’source should be‘ nervous ’
Employment attorneys in Florida said Jones said state employees who leaked internal records could face disciplinary action or potential legal trouble – although they would be able to get protection under state whistleblower laws.
Jones filed a whistleblower complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations in June-July, asking to be re-employed from a previous salary. That complaint is still pending and at this stage of the process it is confidential, according to his lawyer Verters.
Florida employment lawyer Kathleen Scott, who is not involved in the case, said that because of the complaint, people who have been declared intent on helping Jones with his whistle-blowing could argue that he should be protected from retaliation by the state. In some cases, “if you disclose further information about the whistle-blower, you’ll be safe for it,” Scott said.
But another state employment lawyer, Matthew Fenton, said he would be “nervous” if he was one of the sources in Jones’ government.
He said that under Florida law, public servants seeking to become whistleblowers usually have to disclose information to certain government officials. “The chain that only has its information leaked is not complying with the order,” he said. “These informal channels will be significantly less secure.”
Investigations centered around whether Jones used the state government’s messaging system without authorization. According to an affidavit by an agent from the law enforcement department, the unauthorized person last month illegally asked government officials in the emergency management system to send a group text message to talk about the coronavirus crisis.
According to the affidavit, the message said, “It is time to speak before another 17,000 people die.” “You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak before it’s too late.”
Officers tracked down the message, which was sent to the IP address attached to Jones’ home on the afternoon of Nov. 10, the agent wrote in an affidavit.
The affidavit also raises questions about the health department’s cybersecurity practices. According to the agent, all users of the emergency planning group – including health department employees and employees of other government agencies – were logged in with the same username and password. The affidavit said the message reached about 1,750 people before the software vendor stopped it.
Cyber security experts said they were surprised the state would use a messaging service with such a weak security protocol. Mark Tehranipur, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Florida and director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research, said the action has raised big red flags.
“Users who share the same username and password are more likely to leak that password, intentionally or unintentionally,” Tehranipur said. “It’s a very old thing to do.”
The state health department did not respond to a request for comment on its cyber security practices.
Decentis is facing increasing criticism for his cowardly response
Jones’s investigation is being conducted because he is being further investigated for his handling of the coronavirus epidemic.
Jones, who helped create the state’s coronavirus dashboard, has become one of the governor’s fiercest critics, publicly accusing Decentis of being responsible for the rising death toll.
She said she thinks the robbery is an attempt to silence her by Descentis, and is an indication of how her criticism is becoming a thorn in the side of her administration. He said, ‘I had six months of success against him in destroying his reputation.’
But Desantis’s office fee says he had no prior knowledge of the raid.
Fred Piccolo, a spokesman for the governor’s office, told CNN that the governor was not aware of the investigation and that he would give his opinion on what information should be used in any criminal proceedings. “This is a case involving the unauthorized use of a text messaging system in which Floridians rely on timely, fact-based corrections. The governor has full confidence in the law enforcement to address this issue and the courts.”
The state police raid was criticized as ‘over-the-top’
There was also disagreement over what exactly happened inside Jones’ Tallahassee home a day after the raid.
Jones released a video in which he showed an officer pointing a gun at the stairs of his home. He said he was pointing a weapon at his 2-year-old daughter, 11-year-old son and her husband, who said he was in the stairs, although the video does not specify that. Outside his home, in view of the video, another officer “showed me a six-inch gun from my face,” Jones said.
But the department’s commissioner, Rick Sveringen, said in a statement that “no one in the house was ever shown weapons.” Agents knocked on her door and called Jones several times, and she hung out with them and refused to come to the door for about 23 minutes, the department said. The department did not respond to a question about whether officers at his home wear body cameras.
A spokesman for the department, Plessinger, said agents exercised extreme restraint during the execution of the search warrant yesterday, especially considering the significant delays in getting admission.
“It took him a few minutes to get dressed because he believed the police were there to arrest him,” said Jones’s lawyer, Waters.
The dramatic video of Jones entering his home with guns pulled by officers went viral, and his tweet with a clip of the video had more than 120,000 retweets as of Tuesday morning.
Many democratically elected officials in the state condemned the raid.
“This is not being done to promote any crime. It is being done to intimidate,” Filippkowski told CNN.
Jones said that while she will not stop publishing coronavirus data, she plans to move her family away from Florida.
“We’ll move the hell out of here,” he said. “It’s one thing to point a gun at me, it’s quite another to point a finger at my kids.”
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