7 ms·

Update: Prosecutors asked that Rebekah Jones be banned from the internet

155 points by MilnerRoute 6y ago

Zenst 6y ago
"UPDATE (1/18/2021): Monday in court prosecutors asked that Jones be banned from the internet, and be required to wear a GPS monitor — but a judge rejected the request " 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.
- tantalor 6y ago
  Telephone
  - ASalazarMX 6y ago
    And post mail, very efficient to prepare her defense on time.
  - Zenst 6y ago
    Friend of mine needed a lawyer recently and didn't have internet - their experience was beyond painful and took them over a month to secure one and that's getting friends to look up numbers for them. 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.
    - tantalor 6y ago
      They still deliver phone book to my house every year. I use it for kindling.
      - slenk 6y ago
        Just because you get a phonebook doesn't mean everyone does...
  - tape_measure 6y ago
    My landline was replaced with an internet connection a few years ago by the utility. The original landline handset still works, so the change is transparent to the average customer. How would that be handled in this case?
sircastor 6y ago
I’ve not been following this story very closely, but the efforts the state is making seem way overboard for what this woman is being accused of doing. 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.
- tclancy 6y ago
  It seems clearly vindictive since I am not sure how you could practically enforce that or argue it doesn't infringe on someone's rights. Plenty of places expect you to pay exclusively via the Internet nowadays, especially government services.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    This is, unfortunately, an issue where the legal system has been very slow at catching up to reality. Complete Internet bans are clearly unconstitutional after Packingham v. North Carolina, but that was only 3 years ago and in practice I'm not sure the ruling has actually filtered down.
    - throwawaysea 6y ago
      I agree with the spirit of that ruling, that free speech equally requires the ability to receive information. But if we think that’s true, shouldn’t the same spirit apply to bans from social media platforms? Even if the law does not require the same of private companies, surely the same principles would apply?
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        It's not as simple as applying the same standard to private actors, because you should definitely have a strong and unreviewable right to ban sex offenders from your Minecraft server. Obviously there's a big difference between your personal server and a global platform, but the details and implications of that difference are complex debate I don't really want to get into here.
mediaman 6y ago
Prosecutors had argued that Jones had illegally accessed systems to send a public health message through a state alert system. But there does not appear to be evidence that this happened. 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.
tyingq 6y ago
"The warrant alleges that on Nov. 10, Jones downloaded a file equivalent to between 600 and 700 sheets of paper, containing contact information for about 19,182 Floridians. The file contained names, organizations, titles, home counties as well as personal phone numbers and emails, the warrant states." That's new, and doesn't sound good for her.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  You aren't concerned that the state's story against her seems to be a galloping lie? This wasn't what she was accused of months ago, but all of a suddenly it is now.
  - ABeeSea 6y ago
    If they have evidence that it’s true (not saying they do), then it doesn’t matter what the original warrant says. 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.
    - shakna 6y ago
      > How fast would you be arrested and sued if you left those companies with a spreadsheet of customer data on a personal device? 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.
      - ABeeSea 6y ago
        If it contained phone numbers and Covid status, that’s a HIPAA concern no matter the intent or source of data.
cybert00th 6y ago
It's all starting to smack of desperation on the part of the authorities. Hopefully common sense will kick in at some point, but for now it doesn't bode well for those in charge.
nlh 6y ago
Could someone point me toward a good link or explainer on what this whole thing is about? I kinda feel like I've jumped into a soap opera with zero context. Who is Rebekah Jones and wha exactly did she do or not do with the State of Florida's COVID data? (That's all I've gathered so far).
- phkahler 6y ago
  She was in charge of publishing Floridas Covid19 data. She says she was fired for refusing to alter or misrepresent that data. The rest appears to be further retaliation by the state.
- dboreham 6y ago
  She spoke truth to power.
nealabq 6y ago
This Guardian article from August 2020 describes and defends her actions: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/12/florida-rebekah-jones-ron-desantis-coronavirus 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".
buildbot 6y ago
A helpful thought experiment to show why this is clearly vindictive - When has any corporation been arrested and subject to being banned from the internet for having 19,000 peoples contact info. If this punishment is correct and proportional to the crime, what should we have done with Equifax? 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.
- ledauphin 6y ago
  yeah, this is yet another reason why our laws should not be written in terms of "potential future harm" but "actual past harm". 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.
  - aqme28 6y ago
    I understand your point in this case, but I can think of plenty of examples where "potential future harm" is a good reason to make something illegal. Any reckless behavior, for example.
    - i_haz_rabies 6y ago
      Spreading lies that could lead to an insurrection?
      - ledauphin 6y ago
        this one would put nearly every journalist in jail at some point in history. given that it's up to the selfsame govt we're currently discussing to determine what constitutes a lie, this is truly not the best example one could find.
carbocation 6y ago
1. What she did was right, regardless of whether it was lawful. 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.
- chaz6 6y ago
  Regarding your second point, during a pandemic, banning someone from the internet in 2021 could cause harm. Instead of being able to have essential items (food) delivered, one would have to expose themselves to the virus by mingling in a shop.
mercurialshark 6y ago
Packinghan v North Carolina (2017) - Access to social media and digital infrastructure cannot be prohibited by the state. 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.”
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
Does Jones have an official GoFundMe for legal expenses?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- elliekelly 6y ago
  She did[1] but it looks like she far exceeded the goal and has since disabled donations - possibly because the campaign expired? I'm not exactly sure how that works. It's also not clear that the money was for her legal defense. Perhaps at the time she initially ran the fundraiser she wasn't anticipating criminal charges. 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. [1]https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-florida-scientist/ https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-florida-scientist/
  - voodootrucker 6y ago
    My previous comment was down-voted, perhaps because it was not a direct link. Trying again: 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-six-figure-gofundme-campaigns/ https://thecapitolist.com/rebekah-jones-now-has-two-active-s... [2] https://www.gofundme.com/f/DefendScience https://www.gofundme.com/f/DefendScience
closeparen 6y ago
Back button hijacked on mobile Safari to show more ads. I know Slashdot is a venerable institution, but it might be time to put it down. This is a new level of trashy.
- Triv888 6y ago
  I've had to hit the back button twice quickly on slashdot for a long time to be able to go back (Android/Firefox/ads blocked).
- mPReDiToR 6y ago
  Ads pushed me off the site. Too much JS and CSS, done poorly. I have ThinkGeek gear lying around and my main ship on Star Trek Online was NCC-687141 (my late registered uid) because /. was a great site years ago which I was proud to use. Venerable, venerated, missed.

155 points by MilnerRoute 6y ago

"UPDATE (1/18/2021): Monday in court prosecutors asked that Jones be banned from the internet, and be required to wear a GPS monitor — but a judge rejected the request " 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.

tantalor 6y ago
Telephone
- ASalazarMX 6y ago
  And post mail, very efficient to prepare her defense on time.
- Zenst 6y ago
  Friend of mine needed a lawyer recently and didn't have internet - their experience was beyond painful and took them over a month to secure one and that's getting friends to look up numbers for them. 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.
  - tantalor 6y ago
    They still deliver phone book to my house every year. I use it for kindling.
    - slenk 6y ago
      Just because you get a phonebook doesn't mean everyone does...
- tape_measure 6y ago
  My landline was replaced with an internet connection a few years ago by the utility. The original landline handset still works, so the change is transparent to the average customer. How would that be handled in this case?

sircastor 6y ago

I’ve not been following this story very closely, but the efforts the state is making seem way overboard for what this woman is being accused of doing. 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.

tclancy 6y ago
It seems clearly vindictive since I am not sure how you could practically enforce that or argue it doesn't infringe on someone's rights. Plenty of places expect you to pay exclusively via the Internet nowadays, especially government services.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  This is, unfortunately, an issue where the legal system has been very slow at catching up to reality. Complete Internet bans are clearly unconstitutional after Packingham v. North Carolina, but that was only 3 years ago and in practice I'm not sure the ruling has actually filtered down.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    I agree with the spirit of that ruling, that free speech equally requires the ability to receive information. But if we think that’s true, shouldn’t the same spirit apply to bans from social media platforms? Even if the law does not require the same of private companies, surely the same principles would apply?
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      It's not as simple as applying the same standard to private actors, because you should definitely have a strong and unreviewable right to ban sex offenders from your Minecraft server. Obviously there's a big difference between your personal server and a global platform, but the details and implications of that difference are complex debate I don't really want to get into here.

mediaman 6y ago

Prosecutors had argued that Jones had illegally accessed systems to send a public health message through a state alert system. But there does not appear to be evidence that this happened. 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.

tyingq 6y ago

"The warrant alleges that on Nov. 10, Jones downloaded a file equivalent to between 600 and 700 sheets of paper, containing contact information for about 19,182 Floridians. The file contained names, organizations, titles, home counties as well as personal phone numbers and emails, the warrant states." That's new, and doesn't sound good for her.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
You aren't concerned that the state's story against her seems to be a galloping lie? This wasn't what she was accused of months ago, but all of a suddenly it is now.
- ABeeSea 6y ago
  If they have evidence that it’s true (not saying they do), then it doesn’t matter what the original warrant says. 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.
  - shakna 6y ago
    > How fast would you be arrested and sued if you left those companies with a spreadsheet of customer data on a personal device? 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.
    - ABeeSea 6y ago
      If it contained phone numbers and Covid status, that’s a HIPAA concern no matter the intent or source of data.

cybert00th 6y ago

It's all starting to smack of desperation on the part of the authorities. Hopefully common sense will kick in at some point, but for now it doesn't bode well for those in charge.

nlh 6y ago

Could someone point me toward a good link or explainer on what this whole thing is about? I kinda feel like I've jumped into a soap opera with zero context. Who is Rebekah Jones and wha exactly did she do or not do with the State of Florida's COVID data? (That's all I've gathered so far).

phkahler 6y ago
She was in charge of publishing Floridas Covid19 data. She says she was fired for refusing to alter or misrepresent that data. The rest appears to be further retaliation by the state.
dboreham 6y ago
She spoke truth to power.

nealabq 6y ago

This Guardian article from August 2020 describes and defends her actions: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/12/florida-rebekah-jones-ron-desantis-coronavirus 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".

buildbot 6y ago

A helpful thought experiment to show why this is clearly vindictive - When has any corporation been arrested and subject to being banned from the internet for having 19,000 peoples contact info. If this punishment is correct and proportional to the crime, what should we have done with Equifax? 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.

ledauphin 6y ago
yeah, this is yet another reason why our laws should not be written in terms of "potential future harm" but "actual past harm". 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.
- aqme28 6y ago
  I understand your point in this case, but I can think of plenty of examples where "potential future harm" is a good reason to make something illegal. Any reckless behavior, for example.
  - i_haz_rabies 6y ago
    Spreading lies that could lead to an insurrection?
    - ledauphin 6y ago
      this one would put nearly every journalist in jail at some point in history. given that it's up to the selfsame govt we're currently discussing to determine what constitutes a lie, this is truly not the best example one could find.

carbocation 6y ago

1. What she did was right, regardless of whether it was lawful. 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.

chaz6 6y ago
Regarding your second point, during a pandemic, banning someone from the internet in 2021 could cause harm. Instead of being able to have essential items (food) delivered, one would have to expose themselves to the virus by mingling in a shop.

mercurialshark 6y ago

Packinghan v North Carolina (2017) - Access to social media and digital infrastructure cannot be prohibited by the state. 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.”

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

Does Jones have an official GoFundMe for legal expenses?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
elliekelly 6y ago
She did[1] but it looks like she far exceeded the goal and has since disabled donations - possibly because the campaign expired? I'm not exactly sure how that works. It's also not clear that the money was for her legal defense. Perhaps at the time she initially ran the fundraiser she wasn't anticipating criminal charges. 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. [1]https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-florida-scientist/ https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-florida-scientist/
- voodootrucker 6y ago
  My previous comment was down-voted, perhaps because it was not a direct link. Trying again: 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-six-figure-gofundme-campaigns/ https://thecapitolist.com/rebekah-jones-now-has-two-active-s... [2] https://www.gofundme.com/f/DefendScience https://www.gofundme.com/f/DefendScience

closeparen 6y ago

Back button hijacked on mobile Safari to show more ads. I know Slashdot is a venerable institution, but it might be time to put it down. This is a new level of trashy.

Triv888 6y ago
I've had to hit the back button twice quickly on slashdot for a long time to be able to go back (Android/Firefox/ads blocked).
mPReDiToR 6y ago
Ads pushed me off the site. Too much JS and CSS, done poorly. I have ThinkGeek gear lying around and my main ship on Star Trek Online was NCC-687141 (my late registered uid) because /. was a great site years ago which I was proud to use. Venerable, venerated, missed.