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United States Government

Whatever Happened to Fired Covid-19 Data Manager Rebekah Jones? (cosmopolitan.com) 272

"Outside were more than half a dozen officers in tactical vests brandishing a sledgehammer and automatic weapons. Hands held high, she opened the door..."

A new article includes video of that moment — and describes not only what happened then, but what's happening now, and what's going to happen next: It was [Governor] DeSantis who brought the fight to her doorstep — figuratively, then literally... The state claims it traced the message to Jones's IP address. Jones claims they knew her IP address from when she worked from home... "If DeSantis thought pointing a gun at my face was a good way to get me to shut up, he's about to learn just how wrong he was...."

In January, she was charged with a felony for allegedly accessing the state emergency message system. If convicted, she could face five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. By then, she had moved her family to the D.C. area, in hopes of putting this chapter behind them all and starting over. She had to return to Florida to turn herself in or else risk extradition. She drove the nearly 1,000 mile, two-day journey alone, determined to keep her kids from reexperiencing the trauma of policemen pounding down their door... The morning she was supposed to leave, Jones started feeling unwell... The next day, she finished the drive — "it was a miracle I did not die or kill someone in my car," she says — and was booked into the Leon County Detention Facility, where she tested positive for COVID-19... She was isolated to keep from exposing other inmates...

[S]he's still proceeding with a whistleblower complaint against the Florida DOH, which is pending. And she's still running her own independent Florida COVID-19 dashboard, Florida COVID Action, which she started last June after being fired. She eventually raised more than $500,000 on GoFundMe to help support the site (along with her living expenses). She's also wrapping up work on The Covid Monitor, a project with the nonprofit FinMango that uses Google tools to help document COVID-19's spread at schools. The work has helped her survive the longest year of her life (and, quite frankly, many people's lives)... She's writing a book about her experience. And although she'd love to get another job working in science, she's not holding her breath. "I haven't met a whistleblower who has landed on their feet any time in the immediate aftermath of whistleblowing," she says wryly.

When asked what she hopes to get out of her lawsuit, she pauses and then says, "An apology. I want a fucking apology."

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Whatever Happened to Fired Covid-19 Data Manager Rebekah Jones?

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 13, 2021 @09:31PM (#61155712)

    For every day she spent in jail, all those above her all the way to the Governor should spend a week in jail!
    There have to be severe repercussions for conspiracy to commit fraud, falsifying scientific data, falsifying government data, using public office to intimidate and persecute employee and whistleblower, etc

    I bet nothing happens except to her for standing up for integrity and honesty.

    • by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Sunday March 14, 2021 @06:37AM (#61156550)
      DeSantis is a truly monumental pile of fucking excrement... But Rebekah Jones is also highly unstable and a conspiracy theorist.
      I wouldn't be too eager to side with someone just because they're against DeSantis.
  • Why did she ask her boss about the hotline? It's a three word search ("florida whistleblower hotline") and the first result for both Google and Bing. (Tried a few other states as well, seems consistent)

  • Better than China (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Saturday March 13, 2021 @09:49PM (#61155736)
    Hey, at least this is better than China. We have a free press that can report about this. It does fuck all to actually help the situation of whistleblowers getting arrested by the state.

    But at least we're better than China. Somehow.
    • by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Saturday March 13, 2021 @10:16PM (#61155774)
      The US actually incarcerates a higher % of its adult population than China (or Russia) ... though people don't "disappear" or end up on a polonium diet as often.
      • The death penalty is used much more liberally in China than in the US (I can't speak for Russia, I've never read those numbers) in that you can see people being sentenced to death for crimes that didn't result in the death of anyone. That's a pretty effective way of keeping prison populations down.
        • China executes about 2400 people per year. Adjusted for population, that would be about 600 people per year in the US. That's about 6x higher than the US peak, but still pretty rare compared to prison population (or population as a whole, even).
        • And organ harvesting of Muslim and Falun Gong prisoners, as reported by the Falun Gong.

                  https://chinatribunal.com/ [chinatribunal.com]

        • by Cyberax ( 705495 )

          The death penalty is used much more liberally in China than in the US (I can't speak for Russia, I've never read those numbers)

          Russian Constitution technically allows death penalty. But right now the harshest penalty in the penal code is lifetime in prison. The last execution was in 1996.

          • Not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            And that's definitely not the latest one.
            • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
              That was an assassination, like the US does with people in Afghanistan or what Israel does with Iran scientists.
              • by k2r ( 255754 )

                accidentally modded down.

              • Yeah, no shit. It was tongue-in-cheek. As though assassinations of journalists aren't executions carried out by secret order of, in this case, Putin.
              • like the US does with people in Afghanistan or what Israel does with Iran scientists.

                Eh, you're walking a fine line there.
                You're not wrong... But they're also not very comparable.
                The US assassinates terrorist leaders.
                Israel assassinates enemy scientists with purported aims of making their country a nuclear power.
                Russia assassinates political dissidents.

                I'm not trying to justify what the US and Iran does, as I find both actions fucking reprehensible.
                But even taking that into account, that's a whole different ballgame than assassinating your own citizens over dissent.

            • That was not an execution, that was a murder.

      • The US actually incarcerates a higher % of its adult population

        Ha Ha Ha that you actually believe China's rate of incarceration figures.

        Do you think China's numbers include the entire Uighur Muslim population of China? You know, the ones they keep in re-education camps?

        • Why would they include the entire Uyghur population? Do you REALLY think that 100% of Uyghurs are imprisoned?

          Here's an exercise for you: what is the actual population of Uyghurs in China? And what is the population of people in China. Divide one by the other, since you are, for some inexplicable reason, assuming that the entire Uyghur population is imprisoned.
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday March 13, 2021 @10:26PM (#61155792)
    The raid was pretty transparently done to silence her. Florida's look numbers cooked to all hell and back, and the state reopened on the strength of those numbers. Meaning if it was conclusively proven they were false it would look bad for the ruling party. Probably not bad enough to matter (this is a state filled to the brim with Medicare recipients that elected a guy convicted of Medicare fraud first to the governorship and then gave him a Senate seat), but still....

    I'm not holding my breath though, there's been a concerted effort to pack the courts for the last 20,30 years or so... Still, our judicial system has been known to surprise me.
  • No matter how you feel about COVID, she accessed state computers 6 months after being fired. You can’t do that and expect nothing to happen. That’s why she’s in jail, not for refusing to change COVID numbers. But somehow she’s spun this into her being the victim and raised $500,000 on gofundme.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      she accessed state computers 6 months after being fired.

      Only according to those who asked her to fake the numbers.

      • Serious question: (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tiqui ( 1024021 ) on Saturday March 13, 2021 @11:25PM (#61155926)

        Is there any proof her claims are true? Do we have any proof that she was ordered to doctor COVID numbers? I am open to the idea - we've had a bunch of governors, like the ones in New York, and Michigan do it so it's certainly in the realm of what's possible.

        My problem is that we've also had lots of fake "whistleblowers" who get fired for some reason, then claim to have been whistleblowers (given that there are certain laws to protect whistleblowers, and thus there's an incentive to claim to be one in any labor dispute). The fact that somebody makes such an assertion does not make it true.

        Again: I am NOT claiming she has no evidence, I am simply asking if she can prove it, or if she has just made accusations, and then people who hate her governor have simply presumed that her accusations are true.

      • by Canberra1 ( 3475749 ) on Sunday March 14, 2021 @12:03AM (#61155996)
        I have a problem with this. Her account should have been deactivated when she left. All passwords are supposed to be changed every 30 days. No generic accounts. Fire the clown in charge of security. There should also be a charge of public endangerment - applicable to the alleged person asking for the numbers to be fiddled.
        • The state system for sending emergency messages that they allege she used has a single user and password for everyone.

          Also, IP addresses can be very easily spoofed. They're not considered reliable evidence in many computer crimes so investigators need to find proof on the computers themselves.

          • by hankwang ( 413283 ) on Sunday March 14, 2021 @05:09AM (#61156408) Homepage

            Also, IP addresses can be very easily spoofed. They're not considered reliable evidence in many computer crimes so investigators need to find proof on the computers themselves.

            You might be able to spoof the sender IP address on an outgoing packet, which is good enough for DoS'ing. But most communication protocols will require bidirectional communication for the connection handshake. When your ip address shows up in the server log of a messaging service, you'll have to blame it on an open wifi access point or the server log having been tampered with.

        • You're assuming there was someone in charge of security. Remember this is the FL state government, we're lucky if DeSantis's down syndrome nephew was in charge but my bet is nobody was.
    • This has nothing to do with anybody's "feeling about COVID," and everything to do with the fact that her boss told her to do something massively unethical and probably illegal, then fired her when she didn't.

      If crime is the only way to do anything about that, you do the fucking crime and you fight like hell.

    • by gTsiros ( 205624 )

      the horror! she accessed computers she was accessing before!

      fuck you

    • by theCoder ( 23772 )

      No matter how you feel about COVID, she accessed state computers 6 months after being fired.

      It's not at all clear to me what exactly Ms. Jones was accused of doing. It sounded like something similar to sending an email to an internal email distribution list that she happened to know the address of because she used to work there. But other reports indicated it was a text message, but that didn't make much sense because the reason given for the raid on her house was that the message had an IP address assign

  • politicization (Score:3, Interesting)

    by harvey the nerd ( 582806 ) on Saturday March 13, 2021 @11:23PM (#61155920)
    Everything is politicized right now. Mishandling of people from the beginning, on the planes and ships, almost as if to insure spread.
    Misreporting at many levels. PCR levels and varied antibodies, presence vs cause of death etc.

    Over all I'd rather be 80 in Florida with Desantis, controlling my own isolation and treatment, than 80 in NY with Cuomo.
  • It's a day ending y, so the government is showing us exactly why they have to start a domestic war on terror.

  • In war, truth is the first casualty.
    -- Aeschylus.

    All too often, the war is against the truth. It's disturbing how many politicians in the USA pretend reality is whatever they say it is, regarding an inconvenient truth as disposible, and most of them belong to the same political party.

  • Can anyone show me the diff of the data? So far I haven't seen it. I remember seeing an article months ago that it wasn't the data being manipulated but it was an argument on how it was displayed on the dashboard. I also found this post: https://polimath.substack.com/... [substack.com]

    So what is the truth? So far I've seen lots of claims, but little specifics.

    The NY/Cuomo is much more specific. Specific numbers of people that were categorized as hospital deaths instead of nursing home deaths. Makes sense because Cuom
  • Hell yea, people in power chosen by people fuck up peoples lives, when did we retard into the medieval ages again?

    You don't change data to show everything is seemingly fine, coz it is not.

    Removal from office for incompetence. period.
    Journalists, do your job.

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