Rebekah Jones is not just an ex-Florida Health Department worker. She's a whistleblower who built the state's COVID-19 tracking dashboard and accused her boss of data manipulation to re-open the state back for business.
Last Monday (7/12), Floria Police Department raided Jones' Tallahassee home with gun-drawn in front of her husband and her kids to seize the equipment she used to build the dashboard. Jones was fired from the department after refusing her boss' order to manipulate the number.
"I was asked by DOH (Department of Health) leadership to manually change numbers. This was a week before the re-opening plan officially kicked off into phase one," she told NPR earlier.
Before the raid, she allegedly sent a broadcast message to over 1,700 members of the state's emergency response team, encouraging 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."
Though Jones vehemently denied the hacking accusation multiple times, the message it conveys is clear and powerful. This raid leaves us with one question lingering: how did she get into the most-advanced data to report the shady business DOH bosses have been doing?
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COVID-19 Whistle Blower Breaching Data Privacy
Ars Technica reported that, in fact, all the usernames and passwords Jones used are restored and can be accessed freely online. The private messaging system she might have used is just an email address that the DOH published on their website.
A publicly available PDF from their own website shows that DOH has one single email and one single password, which can be accessed freely by anyone online. The report says that all the users assigned have the same login credentials, and it does not change even when they resign or are fired from the position. The same pages also have the email address of Florida's Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE).
Backfiring Consequences
In another news, Republican attorney Ron Filipkowski, appointed by Florida's governor Ron DeSantis, protested after the raid by resigning from a state commission. According to AZCentral, he served as a long-time member of the 12th Judicial Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission.
"You don't send 12 armed officers to raid her computer for doing that. That's Gestapo. That's authoritarian dictator tactics. That's not America. It really viscerally bothered me," the attorney told local news outlet The Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Filipkoswki opted to stay on the commission despite the governor's poor performance amidst the pandemic concern, but this raid was a one-time final straw for him. He sees the issue as a legal problem rather than solely a medical one, and he no longer seeks to serve under the current Floridian government.
