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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 whatev

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.

gabereiser 6y ago
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.
- googlryas 6y ago
  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.

gabereiser 6y ago

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.

googlryas 6y ago
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.