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Data Scientist Rebekah Jones, Facing Arrest, Turns Herself in to Authorities
- eecc 6y agoWhen people I know cry out and denounce China I say: yeah true, they’re not the paragon of democracy and there’s not much we can do about it now; especially when we’re blind to our own defections and we fail to address what is most certainly within our own jurisdiction
- bpodgursky 6y agoAs likely flawed as this prosecution is, you are 100% playing into the hands of China's propaganda machine by making any whataboutism comparison whatsoever to the literal genocide China is sweeping under the rug.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThey didn't say anything about genocides in China, simply state cover-ups. Right now you are doing whataboutism, actually - he was making a comparison. In any case, if you wanted to whatabout about genocides you'd pick cases when liberal democracies killed millions of people without any consequence, not about cover-ups, so I think you didn't interpret the comment reasonably.
- bpodgursky 6y agoI am not going to get into the semantics of the argument. If someone says "The US is not in a position to criticize China for <unspecified abuses> because of <specified abuses which are not genocide>, it is an attempt to draw moral equivalence between the two. There is no equivalence to be drawn. There is bad, and there is evil. The two are not the same, and any sentence connecting the two is driven by bad faith or propaganda.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThey aren't attempting to say that. They said that the US also does a lot of abuses that the US accuses China of doing. It certainly is not bad faith. But here, I'll give you a nice fact that will help you be more rational : the US has killed more innocents in the Middle East over lies than China is even accused of imprisoning in Xinjiang. So if you want your measure of evil, there they are. Both are evil.
- justinclift 6y ago> ... the US has killed more innocents in the Middle East over lies than China is even accused of imprisoning in Xinjiang. This confuses me. Isn't the # of people being imprisoned in Xinjiang in excess of a million? That seems like a higher number (that I'm aware of) have been killed in the Middle East by the US in their wars over the last few decades. (?)
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe US has killed in excess of a million people in the Middle East. Around 650 000 people died as a result of the Iraq War, around 50 000 in Afghanistan, around 400 000 in Syria and around 20 000 in Lybia. Of course, neither were purely by the US but rather by a Coalition, but none of them would have happened if it wasn't for the US. I also include deaths from destruction of infrastructure and subsequent power vacuums, as is customary for crimes against humanity.
- selimthegrim 6y agoWhen China gets through sterilizing half of Xinjiang we’ll see what bears out in the population growth statistics
- kurthr 6y agoFirst, it's good that the state this time allowed her to avoid a potential police shooting by letting her turn herself in rather entering a home armed with fingers on triggers. Second, whataboutism is part of the problem, not part of the solution. This article wouldn't even be published in China... and arrests that happen in China wouldn't be published in China. So how does it help to not publish when police overreach due to political interference?
- salmon30salmon 6y agoI posted this elsewhere but you are just incorrect. Yeah because those countries often allow someone to be turn themselves in and then offer the accused freedom of movement for 250 dollars (10% bail). Oh wait they just poison (Russia), disappear (China) or hang (Iran). Are there problems in the US? Oh certainly. But don't belittle the activists in authoritarian countries by saying someone who was arrested for downloading PII is somehow equivalent to poisoning members of an opposition party.
- mempko 6y agoExcept Li Wenliang in China was never jailed and completely exonerated by the state and never lost his job.
- salmon30salmon 6y agoCool you found one! I guess that makes up for all of the other examples of human rights and judicial abuses by China. Someone tell the Uyghurs, China is all good on human rights now! He's also dead. Was it Covid? Did they allow an independent autopsy?
- the-dude 6y agoAren't some death penalties in the US performed by injection of a lethal dose of ... poison ?
- dang 6y agoPlease stop feeding flamewars on HN. You've been doing way too much of this, unfortunately. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cheph 6y agoWhat western nation is actively engaged in genocide? To be sure though, the CCP appreciates every bit of whataboutism they can get. They are also of the position that the west is worse than them, and that their genocide is entirely justified, just like every genocidal regime before them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide https://neveragainrightnow.com/ https://neveragainrightnow.com/
- redisman 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention_in_Yemen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention... Using proxies doesn't really make it any better.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mempko 6y agoYemen rings a bell...
- _-david-_ 6y agoWhen did Yemen become a western nation?
- dragonwriter 6y agoArguably, the United States, both at home [0] and abroad (e.g., Yemen, where the US has been an active supporter of Saudi policy) as part of it's war with any entity seen as insufficiently hostile to Iran.) Of course, defenders will minimize, excuse, and rationalize each of the acts charged to be part of each of those genocides (and, in the latter case, claim that the US isn't responsible for the actions it actively supports but mostly doesn't carry out directly). But then, that's what people carrying out genocides tend to do (certainly, it's what China does with regard to the Uighur genocide), especially in the post-Nuremberg world, where there is a concrete international rejection of overt genocide. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/15/black-americans-genocide-open-season https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/15/black-...
- dang 6y agoThis comment breaks the site guidelines badly. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and note this one: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." This sort of thing, compounded, amounts to the death of this forum as a place for curious conversation, so please take better care of the commons here.
- myth_buster 6y agoIf someone were to give a jist of what happened without giving personal/geographic info, one wouldn't be able to ascertain whether it happened in Russia/China/Iran/<insert your fav "evil" country>. ----------- Edit: From the down votes it appears that I've hit a nerve here. My reference wasn't this particular article but what happened with her in December. [0] There was an armed raid of her house where her equipment were seiezed. I see it as intimidation for going against the state. Perhaps others don't. 0: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/07/florida-police-raid-data-scientist-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/07/florida-poli...
- salmon30salmon 6y agoYeah because those countries often allow someone to be turn themselves in and then offer the accused freedom of movement for 250 dollars (10% bail). Oh wait they just poison (Russia), disappear (China) or hang (Iran). Are there problems in the US? Oh certainly. But don't belittle the activists on authoritarian countries by saying someone who was arrested for downloading PII is somehow equivalent to poisoning members of an opposition party.
- kaitai 6y agoHow does it "belittle activists" to make a comparison?
- salmon30salmon 6y agoBecause by saying there is any equivalence between an activist in HK who is risking their life, or a opposition party member in Russia who has already had an attempt on his life and a woman who was charged with a crime that was on the books before she was charged, and which is something she has admitted to doing, is to downplay the risks the folks fighting true fascism take
- bandyaboot 6y agoIt’s true. Petty prosecutorial corruption is far too common everywhere for it to be labeled as “something you’d expect to see in Russia/China/etc” given the far worse things that go on in those places. But, please, let’s stop pretending this is something other than petty, obvious political corruption of prosecutorial power. We get it, she probably did something that is a crime by the letter of the law. What’s important—and I think you know this—is whether the decision to go after her so aggressively was the result of her going public about the covid data. For me, the suggestion that that isn’t the case here is comically naive or obtuse.
- salmon30salmon 6y agoThe response to her actions seem to be overkill. With that said, what she is accused of doing is illegal (especially downloading PII from the government). Also, she is reaching far beyond her grasp. And sensationalizing quite a bit. I am sure she is intelligent and competent in her role, but that role is not that of an epidemiologist, data scientist or public policy expert. Why does this matter? Well, focusing mainly on the public policy, nothing is cut and dry. Understanding how semi-dependent systems work together is incredibly complex. She is so heavily focused on COVID that she lacks the insight into all of the competing forces that make up a society. And yes, getting those forces wrong will also cost lives. Finally, her dramatization of the number of deaths implies (as many people imply) that any actions (that are not blatantly unconstitutional) could appreciably decrease deaths. Outside of the island nations and China, deaths have a weak correlation with public policy. More suggestive correlations exist for population density (cases) and average age (deaths). And yes, there are outliers (Japan is older, Vietnam is denser) but there are even more outliers on the shutdown argument. The reason this is myopic focus on lockdowns is dangerous is that if undermines the effective mitigation efforts that can help without ruining society. As soon as any leader attempts to ease anything you have the pearl-clutching "give me lockdown or give grandma death" crowd sensationally crying foul. Our ability for reasoned disagreement was a dead horse years ago, but Covid continues to beat it senseless.
- pbourke 6y ago> Outside of the island nations and China, deaths have a weak correlation with public policy. South Korea, Vietnam, Finland, Norway and Thailand are not island nations and yet have a rate of death an order of magnitude lower than the US.
- salmon30salmon 6y agoSouth Korea is basically an island. Their only border is an impregnable military zone. Norway and Finland speak more to density than their geography. But yeah, we need to learn what was different in Vietnam and Thailand. Vietnam is especially interesting, but it could be easily argued that one of their tools is unavailable here (forced detention at camps for the infected)
- superbcarrot 6y agoThis story reminds of - https://www.thisamericanlife.org/696/low-hum-of-menace/act-two-11 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/696/low-hum-of-menace/act-t... > FBI agents question NSA contractor Reality Winner, who was later charged with leaking evidence of Russian interference in U.S. elections. Even the most casual small talk takes on an air of menace.
- underseacables 6y agoThat’s different, Reality Winner stole a secure document from a secure system, smuggled it out and gave it to a third-party. Do you know of any government or corporate employer that would condone such behavior?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sitkack 6y agoHow is this woman such a lightening rod for such forceful rhetoric by fringe elements?
- rc_mob 6y agoFascist leaders in Florida
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoWell for one, she’s a woman. This feels like a slightly more polite version of gamergate. I can imagine the Internet SQW (Status-Quo Warrior) posts now: “actually it’s about ethics in epidemiology”.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoCome on, you know you're just trying to start a flame war here. Let's hold ourselves to a higher standard.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoSincerely, I am not. Based on what I've read about the story, I don't believe she would have received the same level of mistreatment from Florida's state establishment if she was a man. Outside of Disney World and Cape Canaveral, Florida is not exactly a progressive place.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThere's plenty of ways you could have expressed that claim without trying to spark arguments about Gamergate and the term "SJW" .
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoBut that’s my point: it is like gamergate. And I didn’t use that term.
- landemva 6y agoSince the headline calls her a "scientist" now we can rely on "scientific consensus". She isn't a scientist.
- resoluteteeth 6y agoIf the headline said that a computer scientist faced arrest, would you also feel the need to make the same comment?
- recursive 6y agoEven worse: "software engineer"
- dehrmann 6y agoI'm a pretend engineer and I know it.
- the-dude 6y agoI actually studied software engineering during my Technical Computer Science study at the University of Twente ( NL ). Does that bother you?
- recursive 6y agoNo. I call myself a software engineer too sometimes. But I have no engineering certification or training. Just a quirk of language I guess.
- superbcarrot 6y agoThe headline calls her a data scientist because that was her job title. You can have an opinion about the term but there are many people who have that job title, or that term in their degree, or generally work in that subfield of our industry so it's hardly NPR's fault for using the term too.
- 6y ago
- underseacables 6y agoIt seems that the general consensus here is that if a system is open, either without a password, or with a widely known password, it’s OK to go into that system. Even though accessing it may be a crime, reading the comments here it sounds like a lot of people are defending her because of the lack of security on the system as if it absolves her of liability. Did she not access the system without permission?
- recursive 6y agoWhistle blowers are often technically in violation of the rules of the organization they're blowing the whistle on. Or at least claimed to be.
- oh_sigh 6y agoI think what it shows is that almost all people, if given power, would be petty tyrants and not philosopher kings. Crime X is evil when my opponent does it, but when my ally does it, you must look at the context and see she did it for a good reason and shouldn't be punished.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoAre you referring to some other thread? None of the other comments on this article are about system security or passwords.
- choppaface 6y agoThe court video is pretty interesting: https://www.facebook.com/WFLANewsChannel8/videos/154109933178340/ https://www.facebook.com/WFLANewsChannel8/videos/15410993317... 1) The judge in this video is not the county judge who is the source of the warrant against her. (The county judge, I believe, is the one who was appointed by DeSantis and immediately (suspiciously) approved the warrant against Jones that resulted in police guns being pointed at her and her children.) 2) The State prosecutor tried to levy all sorts of crap like no internet. That's probably typical. Note that this person had amazingly stable video / audio somehow. 3) Jones lawyer made some mild arguments about needing to get a job and use a phone etc. Said nothing about the DeSantis judge. The judge in this video immediately disregarded a lot of the prosecutor's asks and deflected a ton to the DeSantis judge. 4) The audio is extremely extremely bad, especially for one of Jones lawyers. The audio just goes garbled half way through his argument. Whoever this is (Zoom? MS? Cisco?) is really liable for screwing up tons of court cases. In all, this video shows exactly how political the justice system is. This judge and the DeSantis judge are pretty night-and-day in their actions against Jones.
- rich_sasha 6y agoMy knowledge of US justice systems is mostly from films... are judges in the US elected? I seem to remember prosecutors are at least. I saw a terrifying series about people confessing to crimes they did not commit, and the struggle to reverse their sentences. One person, proven by DNA to be innocent, would still not have their charges dropped. The prosecutor said his community believed the accused guilty so he cannot go against them.
- choppaface 6y agoThe "DeSantis judge" I mention was appointed by DeSantis (the Governer, who has been pro Trump on a number of issues). Here's an article that is (AFAICT) is rather neutral regarding the judge: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/joshua-hawkes-rebekah-jones-florida-covid-whistleblower-raid-b1771556.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
- Matticus_Rex 6y ago
- Quarrelsome 6y agoSo she was employed to make a dashboard for Florida, made the dashboard, they pressured her to make the numbers look better, she quit and made her own publicly accessible dashboard with the "real" numbers on it. Either after creating her own dashboard or just before, she took resources from work and published a message on the work network which is why she's now being brought in for questioning and charged. With that in mind, wtf are all the other comments in this thread talking about? Its like they're talking about a completely different article or smth.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI have heard so many different stories about this matter. Wouldn’t surprise me if plenty of others have too.
- Quarrelsome 6y agoso why isn't this thread full of articles from other reputable sources?
- starkd 6y agoShe might not have had the qualifications to make the judgement about what data was correct. She was defying the team of epidemiologists. She had a degree in geography and communications. She might have been over-reaching here. She already walked back a number of her commments.
- Quarrelsome 6y agoWell none of that is referenced in this article. Do you have a decent source for these claims? Also I don't think looking down your nose at the quality of her degrees in doing yourself any favours. This article claims she wrote the code that pulled the stats together so at the very least there was some familiarity with the problem set. You'd figure implementation issues are just the matter of a Github review or smth, so how did it get to her being fired and all this crap happening?
- mempko 6y agoWe have a state government actively retaliating against a whistle blower and people are so casual about it. So many people here are "China is worse". I'm sorry, I don't live in China, so I am more worried about my own country targeting whistleblowers.
- effie 6y agoThey will always be targeted, smeared and used for purposes such as pushing a narrative, or setting a frightening example. This is the case everywhere throughout the world, this is the method of state power. "At least we are better than China" is a soothing proverb whose purpose is to make you feel better and do nothing. I wonder what proverb Chinese use.
- mempko 6y agoBrilliant!
- starkd 6y agoNot so sure this story is that of the virtuous whistleblower the article portrays. She has a degree in geography and communications. It's unclear where her knowledge of data science comes from, but she clearly wasn't hired for that. She was defying the team of epidemiologists in publishing bad data. The risk of bad data is just as bad as no data. But the term, data science seems to becoming the new catchall phrase that can mean everything and nothing at the same time.
- worik 6y ago"data science" == newspeak("statistics")
- proverbialbunny 6y agoMy job title is data scientist, just as hers was. It's far less of a catch all title than the job title software engineer is. There are so many different kinds of software engineers, but only a few kinds of data scientists. Of the kind of work she was doing, in 2020 roughly 60% of data scientists did the same kind of work. Yes, not all data scientists create dashboards, but calling the job title a catch all is pretty far from reality.
- verteu 6y agoHer actual complaint about the data [1]: Now a private citizen, Jones continues to take issue with the way the state is calculating its coronavirus positivity rate. The official Florida site says there are more than 1.3 million "total people tested" in Florida, of which about 73,500 were positive, resulting in an "overall percent positive" rate of 5.4%. But Jones says that figure is misleading. "I actually wrote the script to create that data, so I know exactly what it looks like," she says, adding that she's audited it and checked it with several other statisticians to make sure it's correct. She says that on the state's dashboard, any person who tests positive will be counted as a positive test only once, no matter how many times they test positive. But a person who tests negative will be counted over and over again each time they test negative for the coronavirus. Jones says that because many residents, such as health care workers, require repeated testing, the state's dashboard is artificially deflating the true positivity rate. [1] http://npr.org/2020/06/14/876584284/fired-florida-data-scientist-launches-a-coronavirus-dashboard-of-her-own http://npr.org/2020/06/14/876584284/fired-florida-data-scien...
- LatteLazy 6y agoThanks, that really clearly explains her claim.
- xlm1717 6y agoHer dashboard still shows the same positive numbers as the state dashboard. The difference is the state dashboard separates numbers by residents and non-residents, while her dashboard combines the numbers.
- fastglass 6y ago>any person who tests positive will be counted as a positive test only once, no matter how many times they test positive. But a person who tests negative will be counted over and over again each time they test negative for the coronavirus. Which is a reasonable assertion about "the data". This is where the point about her not being a data scientist comes into play, and needs to be cleared before going into anything else, such as her personal life/drama. She, like many others, including those in this comments section, are running afoul when it comes to familiarity with the subject matter of the data. You get counted as a positive case "only once", because (early on in theory) you only get the disease once. Whether that's true or not is beyond her paygrade, to say the least.
- LatteLazy 6y agoThere are a whole bunch of different intersecting issues here. If she illegally accessed the network that's a crime. She shouldn't have done that. Either way there are questions here about the heavy handed response and whether Florida fiddled their covid numbers. Even assuming she is 110% guilty (given the nature of computer laws, everyone is guilty but that's another discussion), I'm not convinced that everyone who emails themselves some documents before they leave gets a swat team at their houses. Or if that is the case, Florida must have a lot of swat teams...
- zaroth 6y agoThere was no SWAT team. A couple officers knocked on her door for 20 minutes and she refused to open it, so they had to call for backup. It was about the most polite you could ever ask for the police to be when refusing them entry while they are serving a warrant to collect evidence. That the serving of the warrant could be so overblown is part of what makes me suspect that the whole ordeal is entirely overblown.
- LatteLazy 6y agoYou're correct, no Swat. I misunderstood the term raid that everyone has bandied about... I am a limey brit. Is it normal over there for people serving a warrant for a non violent crime to draw and point their guns like that? To my foreign eyes it looks a bit nuts even if its not the full "battering ram and tear gas" I'd expected. I guess we'll see what the court actually finds on due course.
- zaroth 6y agoI’m no expert in this but I have a brother-in-law who is a police officer and a brother whose is a defense lawyer who deals with these cases sometimes; here’s how I understand it to work basically. If you refuse to come to the door for 20 minutes, yes I suspect police will draw their guns if they have to force entry into your house to get you. So basically they come to the door and the procedure is “knock-and-announce” — they can’t just immediately come and break your door down unless a judge has signed off on that specifically. Police are required to wait a “reasonable” amount of time. Usually that’s more than 20 seconds but not more than a couple minutes for you to open the door. If you refuse to open the door after a reasonable amount of time, the police are allowed to make a “forced entry”. At that point, having to force entry into a house is itself an escalation and a violent act, and they would reasonably want to be prepared for any response they might encounter since the people inside have already indicated they will not come easily. Meaning it’s more likely they will draw their guns in a forced entry situation.
- roel_v 6y agoUhm, what is missing from most of these 'but whistleblower!' comments is that this woman is an unhinged stalker who, after having an affair with one of her students, went off the rails and was fired from Florida State University in 2017 for it: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8344121/Married-Florida-data-scientist-fired-affair-student-arrested-three-times.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8344121/Married-Flo... . That link has mugshots and parts of the court proceedings, this is not 'slander' from what I can tell. Now, she might still have been pushed in one direction or another, but she has a documented history of being unstable to the extreme; to say that it seems she has a penchant for attracting drama is to put it mildly.
- proverbialbunny 6y agoIt could be slander, because unfortunately the daily mail has a history of making up garbage. Getting fired from a university, getting called in to a psych ward to make sure she was okay, and then immediately after being let go is pretty irrelevant to the case. I'm no lawyer but I'm pretty sure this would be objected as irrelevant if anyone tried to use it in the court case. For all we know it may even be defamation.
- roel_v 6y agoYes I know about the Daily Mail's reputation, but the court documents are linked in the post. I don't have PACER access so I can't verify, but this is one that would be very easy to refute. Also, there are many other online sources reporting on this, and they have been for a long time (see e.g. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6999800-Jones-Stalking-Affidavit.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6999800-Jones-Stalki... ) Is all of this relevant to the whistle blower case? Well, it might not be, but this sort of backstory does call up many questions. How did a person with a history of inappropriate sexual conduct with subordinates get a management position in the first place?
- proverbialbunny 6y ago>How did a person with a history of inappropriate sexual conduct with subordinates get a management position in the first place? If it happened it was a relationship between two consenting adults, so there is not really a reason for them to care.
- stakkur 6y agoArresting data scientists for doing their job was...definitely not on my bingo card for the 21st century.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- WhompingWindows 6y agoCould this worker have drawn attention to faulty code or shoddy methods with a typical blog post or news article? I have a feeling that the allegations, firing and potential trial are just increasing her profile beyond what it would've been, thus further exposing the case to scrutiny. To scrutinize her, I worked for a time as a data analyst in the pandemic too. There was a lot of shoddy work in many places, but no one of the many great employees I worked with hijacked mass communication software to send an inane message. Look at her message's text, it reads like a Tweet, there's no substance to her critique of her government in the actual message in question (she offers some more detailed objections elsewhere). For their part, Florida did a very poor job with COVID. The governor was part of the crew of the GOP who detests science and reason, it seems, or at least capitalizes on those feelings in the populace. I understand why they fired her, you can't have data analysts hijacking your software to send mass messages of protest. I'm not sure if the message really did much damage in the end, saying it distracted fellow employees...is that very damaging? Comparing this to the case at Google, for instance, where the engineer wrote up a long essay with many data points and actual structure...I can't help feeling that both employees' messages were greatly disseminated by the hierarchy's response to them, though I believe her Tweet had much less discussion and text to generate a broader debate here on HN or elsewhere.
- MertsA 6y ago>but no one of the many great employees I worked with hijacked mass communication software to send an inane message. What she's alleged to have done is basically on par with a fired employee sending off a net send on their way out the door. >I understand why they fired her, you can't have data analysts hijacking your software to send mass messages of protest. She was fired before the message was sent. She publicly stated that she was pressured to modify the data provided to make it look like the state was handling the pandemic better than they were. She did draw attention to this by going to the media, this was after she had been a thorn in the side of the state for a while.
- johnnyb9 6y ago"Florida did a very poor job with Covid" - care to elaborate? Death rate per capita: Florida: 110 Population: 21.5 million New York: 206 Population: 19.4 million
- dang 6y agoRelated from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25810942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25810942
- s3r3nity 6y agoWhat kind of charge is "offenses against users of computers, computer systems, computer networks and electronic devices?"