Florida’s justification for raiding whistleblower Rebekah Jones is looking shaky | Hacker News Reader

Florida’s justification for raiding whistleblower Rebekah Jones is looking shaky

theverge.com

79 pointsTomte15 comments

From the article: “You don’t send 12 armed officers to raid her computer for doing that. That’s Gestapo.

Exactly. The search warrant could have been served administratively. The officers weren’t just armed. They had guns drawn. It’s a bad look if nothing else.

People are freaking out about the guns.

Sending people to "administratively" steal all of her phones, computers, records, and storage devices for publishing the truth when the state wants only lies published instead is the real story here. Whether they do it with firearms or not is mostly irrelevant.

This is a story about government censorship, a 1A issue.

The government's power to issue search warrants should be pretty significantly scaled back in general, and its power to do anything in the absence of one should be severely restricted to zero.

I don’t disagree with your general sentiment, but I think the facts in the case are very much in doubt. It may turn out to be as you say, but we’ll have to wait for that. On the other hand the manner in which the warrant was executed is on video. Regardless of the actual crime committed, or not, the use of force was egregious. In particular drawing a weapon in the absence of a threat is most likely a violation of police policy. It certainly put all involved at greater risk.

Do a five whys.

Why were the police breaking into her house to steal her publishing tools in the first place?

Why was there a search warrant?

Why did the prosecutor seek one?

Two more and you get to the real problem.

Hint: it had nothing to do with "unauthorized access", or whatever.

File under: #WhyNotBoth?

Yes, the confiscation in itself is an attack on free speech rights.

But don’t think the high-stress weapons-drawn raid against a prominent whistleblower isn’t meant to send its own message clear and loud: keep your heads down or you could be next. Especially when combined with the twitchy trigger finger that US law enforcers are reputed to possess.

This is only a couple steps up from a banana republic death squad. And that too is no accident.

I, like the author of this article, am not a lawyer (it seems one of the responsibilities of a journalist is to ask a lawyer for their opinion on this sort of thing when writing an article about it though), but:

> But if Jones did happen to send an email to a giant mailing list she used to be part of, one listed on the open web, would that be much of a crime?

Aren't US computer crime laws painfully stupid and written in such a way that it would be? The analogy being "just because a person's door is unlocked doesn't mean you have the right to enter", that sort of thing?

Doesn't make the raid any less scummy, of course.

Remember that weev taught us that violating a EULA is now a felony (per the 'it's a violation of the EULA therefore isn't permitted access' theory).

Doesn't matter what the justification is. First they decide who to charge or raid. Then they conjure up a reason to do it.

There's some confused reporting going on here. Sometimes this act is talked about as if there was some email address like public_messaging@florida.gov or whatever, and someone sent an email to that address (which forwards it to thousands of other people). IANAL but I'd imagine that would not be illegal.

The other possibility is that there is some marginally secured website, where you log in with user:admin, password:password, and from there you can send a message to thousands of people. I'd imagine doing that without authorization, even if the security is dead simple and easy to bypass, would be illegal.

My guess is that the latter is what happened, and they have a comcast IP address logged which is associated with her address.

Maybe she didn't do it, but it seems likely she did. Perhaps her husband did, because he found the common username/password on a sticky note in their office?

In any case, some law was probably broken by someone in that household.

Regarding the guns drawn while serving the search warrant, the only thing I can say is that yes, it appears silly to think that someone who just really cares about COVID procedures is going to kill some cops, but dumber things have happened that resulted in the death of a cop - things which they probably watched training videos on - and police have been trained to protect themselves first rather than risk being overpowered.

If she really did wait 20 minutes to come down after the police served the search warrant, I can't blame them for having their hackles up.

Unless it was stored as a cookie and when she may have opened up a tab or clicked on the wrong bookmark left over from work that it logged her in. Either way, the lax security at florida.gov should be the ones arrested. Go pen test it right now.

To have a bunch of police to serve a search warrant is one thing, to have them serve it guns drawn is another. It’s not like she lives in a meth den.

I doubt that would be much of an excuse. If she did send the message, she would have known that she was accessing a state system when she had no business doing so at that time. And shared logins are clearly bad security practice, but that isn't against the law. You aren't allowed to break into someone else's house if they don't have a lock on their door, or if the lock on their door is easily pickable after doing a 5 second googling on how to do so. I don't see why the electronic equivalent would be any different.

The guns may have only been drawn because she (again, allegedly) waited 20+ minutes to come down after she knew the police were there with a warrant. If everyone just left the house immediately, I doubt they would have felt compelled to draw their guns (or, they would have drawn them in an empty house, which isn't so bad).

There's no real logic to people who choose to violently resist the police. Officers have been killed by people who they were just going to give a verbal warning to. Or weren't even interacting with. And those kinds of situations are the ones that cops are trained on. So even if they are rare, that is what they are taught to do, because it is safer from the cops perspective to have their gun drawn on someone who is non-violent, rather than not have their gun drawn on someone who may turn violent.

I wouldn't like it if an officer pointed a gun at my family in my own home. But I also wouldn't behave the way she did by not responding fairly quickly to officers who show up with a legal warrant.

It doesn’t look all that shaky to me.

After being fired in May she allegedly connected back into an account that’s part of the emergency alert system to send an alert message to 1,700 members of an emergency response team urging them to “speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”

Jones has raised over $500k so far since she was fired and went public claiming the state was manipulating data. $200k of that in the last 48 hours.

I fail to see how even if they sent that email how it would justify the warrant and police response. I don't see too many other instances of this happening, probably because the general sane thing to do would be to remove that person from having access to that account. I'm not seeing anything that seizure of electronic equipment would further remedy that issue.

People get served with warrants all the time during criminal investigations.

When you refuse to come out of the house when the police repeatedly demand it, that tends to escalate the situation.

A fired employee accesses a government system to mass email the emergency response team, the first thing that’s going to happen is a warrant for your electronic devices to image them and investigate. This is in no way surprising.

I think we are hearing about it because Jones is using this as a fund raising strategy.

People who refuse to follow police authority do not need escalation they need de-escalation. Police should not be escalating things beyond what is necessary and should be the ones acting professionally and not freaking out when people don’t do what they ask. When I worked in dementia care we constantly had to manage people who were not listening and doing inappropriate things. Hint; we did not get out the paddle. So just because someone is not listening does not mean you need to escalate and bring guns to a situation that had none. The escalation should have been “if you don’t come out we will break down your door and take you out” that’s it. You people who justify guns for every situation where someone doesn’t follow very minor law is absurd. Resisting arrest though against the law happens countless times across the country and the police are not supposed to draw guns if they don’t need to. They could use a taser first for example. Protesters climb trees or barricade them selves to prove a cause. They resist arrest. The last protesters I saw around here the RCMP just said ok screw it let’s just block the roads going in and when they get hungry they will come out. It didn’t last long before they were starved out. So I don’t buy your argument that because she didn’t listen this had to escalate. Not to the point of guns in her face.

What I was trying to say is that locking yourself in the house and refusing to come out is an escalation. Not that police should escalate.

In any case, they've now posted the body cam videos. I don't see any evidence of police "freaking out". You can see from the video, there was never a gun in her face. IMO they demonstrated patience (trying to get her to open the door for over 20 minutes) and seem very professional.

  https://vimeo.com/489556079
  https://vimeo.com/489554493

> The body camera video starts at 8:25 a.m., when a female Tallahassee Police Department officer and male FDLE agent approach the door. At 8:26, they began ringing the doorbell and knocking on the door. During the initial approach, agents tried to minimize disruption to the children, attempting to speak with Ms. Jones at the door to explain the search warrant. At approximately 8:31, agents went to the back of the house and saw Ms. Jones’ husband going upstairs. The situation continued for 23 minutes without cooperation of Ms. Jones, including several phone calls to her.

> Upon entry into Ms. Jones’ residence (8:48am), agents observed a video camera, pointed in the direction of the front door, which appeared to be recording the entire time the agents were inside the residence. The video, property of Ms. Jones, was not seized during the search warrant. Electronic devices belonging to Ms. Jones’ children and husband were forensically examined on scene and determined to have no investigative value. Those devices were not seized in an effort to minimize disruption to the family.

https://www.fdle.state.fl.us/News/2020/December/FDLE-release...

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