Update: Prosecutors asked that Rebekah Jones be banned from the internet
yro.slashdot.org
yro.slashdot.org
Instead, they have collected evidence that she allegedly downloaded some data from the state with peoples' information on it. It's not clear how good their evidence is, but this is pretty different than what they alleged earlier, and different than what the warrant was for, so it looks like Florida prosecutors are fishing for any sort of crime they can stick to her.
Jones says she had been asked to manipulate COVID data as part of her responsibility of running the FL COVID dashboard, which she refused to do. When she was fired, she started her own dashboard, and criticized the integrity of official dashboard data, which upset officials.
Good for the Judge, things like this by the prosecution are abusive IMHO. GPS tracker - ok, even monitoring internet activity would be ok'ish, but a downright ban would be akin to saying you can't see a lawyer and in today's Zoom times, that would be exactly the case.
Hate to imagine how they would of coped had they not had people who could Google for them at hand, let alone if there was some restriction that would potentially place those friends foul of the law thru aiding and abetting access to the internet.
Things like that sure do paint a perspective of how the internet has encompassed so much of our daily lives. Phone books being a simple example with many now just online and not seen a physical phone directory for well over a decade now. A small thing, but lots of those add up.
How would that be handled in this case?
Edit - FYI I'm pretty sure they'd count something like your outlook updating it's work contact list because they where too lazy to lock you out. The downloaded file is a perfect match for a giant contact list, like of everyone if the Florida Health department.
Possessing lots of people's information, as skeevy as it may sound in our modern era, should not be a crime. Misusing it should be. If you can't point to specific harms, you end up in a dystopia of "precrime". You also tend to give actual human beings (like this one) _less_ credit than large corporations (full of lots of human beings) for their ability to, over time, forgo doing the actual harm that they _could_ given the (massive) resources that they have.
Any reckless behavior, for example.
I think banning someone from the internet is rapidly approaching “cruel and unusual”. I don’t think people understand how critical web access is to typical life in the US these days. I don’t mean casual surfing either. News, jobs, contact information.
Seems like she did the crime here and deserves the full ban.
2. Banning people from the internet in the 1990s when the world functioned offline is quite different from doing so in 2020. The bar for that should be extraordinary.
Marsh v Alabama (1946) - Constitutional protections of 1st and 14th amendments applicable within confines of “town” owned by a private entity.
As Justice Ginsburg said during oral argument regarding private digital networks, “the point is that these people are being cut off from a very large part of the marketplace of ideas. And the First Amendment includes not only the right to speak, but the right to receive information.”
And as Justice Kagan stated during Packinghan oral argument, "whether it’s political community, whether it’s religious community... these sites have become embedded in our culture as ways to communicate and ways to exercise our constitutional rights.”
Hopefully common sense will kick in at some point, but for now it doesn't bode well for those in charge.
Venerable, venerated, missed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/12/florida-rebe...
TLDR: she felt the Florida Governor was pushing to re-open schools etc too fast for political reasons. To save lives, she pushed against the official narrative.
I don't know if she just lobbied her colleagues, or if she hijacked the state's website. It does sound like she was "insubordinate".
I'm fairly certain this was the "official" one because it was linked to from an NPR article and she had done an interview with them. But I have to say, it's a very odd choice for a GoFundMe photo for such serious accusations. So for that reason there's a small part of me that wonders whether or not it's legit.
This article explains why the first one was disabled [1].
This appears to be the new one [2].
[1] https://thecapitolist.com/rebekah-jones-now-has-two-active-s...
That's new, and doesn't sound good for her.
Replace government with Apple or Microsoft or Amazon customer data. How fast would you be arrested and sued if you left those companies with a spreadsheet of customer data on a personal device?
Edit: Especially as a data scientist. You are given access to some these companies most secret data. If she actually did this, I wouldn’t hire her.
Why do I get the feeling as more information comes out, we're going to find out this "600-700 sheets of paper" is an excel spreadsheet with COVID infection information that someone at the state forgot to sanitize before posting for public consumption? And we'll find out she did absolutely nothing wrong, and they're just grasping at straws to make her look bad in the public, hoping she'll go away.
Or she was fired but her access wasn't terminated because their IT practices are crap, so it was accesses both knowingly without authority and without hacking, just like if physical access controls like keys and let adds weren't updated and she walked in and took confidential documents that she would previously have had lawful access to.
If the file was on a public website, then I hope the government smacks the prosecutor down hard. If the file contained citizen PII related to covid, I would hope it’s not on a public website. And if it did contain specific Covid infections for citizens, that’s a HIPAA violation for both her and the government agency if it was on a public website.
Plenty of companies, and especially government bodies, fail to clean devices correctly when employees leave.
This could be nothing more than an undeleted email that was part of her work. Or something mistakingly sent to the wrong employee that she failed to delete.
IIRC, it technically would not, as the public health authorities to which HIPAA allows disclosure for public health purposes are not themselves HIPAA covered entities, so any improper disclosures of data they hold are not HIPAA concerns (for state public health authorities, they would generally be covered by state privacy laws, though.)
Sound like she downloaded an excel spreadsheet
Is that why her house was raided?
This data sounds a lot like the publicly available WA state employees directory[0]. Does FL have something similar? Joining this data with email and phone numbers is typically a matter of looking up the user in another department-local directory.