She does appear to have legal representation with the right kind of experience. Stephen Dobson, from this firm https://www.ddslaw.net/Attorneys/ will be her criminal defense lawyer. She's also already filed a civil case.
A sibling comment is linked to her GoFundMe, which appears to be about halfway to it's 500k goal.
How many other instances are out there where authorities "can't say what someone is charged with" until they're in custody. This smells like a CYA deal with DeSantis and his partisan bungling of the COVID crisis.
Having cops invade her home and hold her children at gunpoint didn’t scare her into becoming his scapegoat, so it’s important to escalate the campaign of violence against her.
> Having cops invade her home and hold her children at gunpoint didn’t scare her into becoming his scapegoat, so it’s important to escalate the campaign of violence against her.
You make it sound like the police broke into her home and deliberately pointed weapons at her children. That’s completely bullshit.
The police had a warrant signed by a judge. They repeatedly asked her to open the door, she refused. This went on for over 20 minutes. When they eventually did get inside, they’re entering a premise where the suspect had already demonstrated to not be cooperating and it’s standard practice to enter with your weapon drawn.
You could argue with whether the warrant itself is justified. But the police did everything the way they’re supposed to and the only person who put those children at risk was the mother who refused to cooperate with a legally signed warrant.
She didn’t know if she was being arrested and was in pajamas. I’ve read of other famous people being given plenty of time (in FL) to get ready before a search warrant is executed. Considering what we know about Florida and what is happening there with COVID and it’s reporting, I am willing to give her the benefit of doubt. Plus the pretext of the warrant is bad. “Cops just doing their job” doesn’t matter when it is a politically motivated state actor. They are the state and a part of the machine being used to violate her rights.
It’s more about fair and equal treatment, whatever that is. The hypocrisy of modern policing is extreme. Should she have been given more or less time? Clearly give different treatment to some people. The law is supposed to be impartial. And in a case that is already political suppression of first amendment rights, it stands out.
The only person who put those children at risk was the mother who refused to cooperate with a legally signed warrant.
Wow, let's extend that reasoning just a bit further. If someone SWATs me (or pulls strings to get a warrant for my arrest), and I don't open the door immediately, I bear the responsibility for putting my family at risk?
Swatting first of all is a crime. Secondly yes, you do need to comply, even if you are innocent. Otherwise you will get shot.
Nobody is denying it's government overreach, blatant disregard to our rights, and breaks the 4th amendment. But wool should've been over everyone's eyes like 10 years ago. The US acts no different than China in how the state allows government abuse of power to fuck you bureaucratically. Unlike places like Germany where the state compensates you for your time and money if they can't prove your criminality, also reserving your job as well unless convicted; The US just says fuck you but only with slightly more rights than China gives their citizens.
Immediately? She had over 20 minutes of knocking and a few phone calls in that period. People should watch the video and think about how long of a time 20 minutes is. They’ll most likely even find it boring and start skipping ahead to more knocking without a response.
> She had over 20 minutes of knocking and a few phone calls in that period.
So what? If somebody is knocking on my door, in the middle of the night, claiming to be a police officer, then making phone calls to verify that is 100% reasonable. If I had just been fired for politically motivated reasons, then making phone calls to alert the media when your home is being raided is 100% reasonable.
> They’ll most likely even find it boring and start skipping ahead to more knocking without a response.
Police are allowed to be bored. Police are allowed to sit outside a house and wait. It does them no harm, and does not justify them using additional force when serving the warrant.
It was a sunny morning, not the middle of the night. Obviously that's a minor detail, but it's indicative of a larger problem - there's been a big game of telephone on the actual circumstances of this raid, so your mental image of what happened may be different than what the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of7ITokML-A) shows.
Good point, and thank you. The relevant pieces that I had remembered were that there was a police raid for a non-violent crime, and was emphasizing that that is not an urgent issue. It's the same way that if you see police lights pulling you over on a deserted road, you should call to verify that it is a legitimate officer.
Don't Americans have the right for their lawyer or a trusted witness to be present during search warrants? If they do, why would police ever expect to enter without delay?
Are there other countries where it works that way? It's hard for me to see how a standard where you don't even have to come outside until your lawyer gets there would work; what would stop people from using the waiting time to destroy all the evidence the police came for?
Coming from a place where search warrants do have be executed with the oversight of the owner or their representative, police would still expect to enter without delay.
In a situation like this there may be a pause until the owner or lawyer arrives, but during that pause the people would not be permitted to be in the to-be-searched location without police supervision; the owner has the right to supervise police while they are searching, but they don't have any privacy right to do stuff there before letting the police in; if the lawyer's presence is required then whoever is in that location would let the police in and wait for the lawyer together with the police officers with neither doing anything until the search commences. If noone is present, then the police may seal the door while they wait for the owner or their representative to arrive; or, alternatively (e.g. if the owner is on the run), there is a process to recruit neutral witnesses from the community, e.g. having your neighbours supervise the search and sign off on what was taken out during the search.
The cops aren’t wild animals. They should have the ability to figure out whether or not a web developer/data scientist at home with warrants for nonviolent allegations is worth drawing a gun in a house with children in it.
We need to hold cops to a higher standard of behavior.
Fun fact: when the police needed to find a judge to evaluate the strength of their warrant, the one they found was a family court judge brand new to the bench, whose signature in her warrant literally being the first one he signed in his career. They understand it makes it abundantly clear that they are engaged in a witch hunt, but communicating threats of state violence against whistleblowers is a much more important priority than the semblance of justice.
Sadly, when you give people a stick and tell them they are allowed to beat other people with it, at least some of them tend to start behaving a bit like wild animals. It’s sad, but seemingly unavoidable.
Be that as it may, spinning the story as involving the cops "holding her children at gunpoint" is a wild distortion and indicates the low quality of discussion that this issue has generated.
In Florida, even web developers are allowed to own guns. It sounds like the cops kept a level head and didn't shoot anybody. This was probably pretty routine for Florida cops.
This particular warrant case is not being searched for any violent behavior and has no history of violence, with the warrant happening in a place with no history of violence or abuse. There is no reason to be pulling guns in a home with children as soon as one enters it.
It shouldn’t be routine to draw weapons in a place where there is no reason to presume weapons exist.
It being Florida is enough reason to presume guns might be present in the house. Note that contrary to the expectations of many foreigners, Florida does not have a list of all Floridians who own guns. In fact it's actually illegal for the state to create such a list.
The children seem to be irrelevant; if children weren't in the house I doubt you'd suddenly be fine with what the cops did, so the presence of children doesn't contribute to your point. Furthermore some of the narratives about what happened are greatly exaggerating the situation, claiming that cops pointed guns in the faces of children. I've seen no evidence of this happening, so I think some people are cynically pointing to the children in an attempt to emotionally manipulate others. I don't see any other reason to mention the kids. They simply aren't relevant to the story.
> In fact it's actually illegal for the state to create such a list.
To elaborate on this a little bit, NO state in the US has such a list - not one worth a damn, that is. For instance, NY recently mandated the registration of all "assault weapons" in the state, but compliance there is estimated to be in the single-digit percent range. (1m+ applicable weapons, ~45,000 registrations - the definition is really broad and includes essentially everything semiautomatic with a detachable magazine) These weapons were previously legal to own/buy/sell/transfer, and would continue to be legal to own if registered - and registration still didn't crack 10%.
Extrapolate to people that the police are likely to deal with in an adversarial manner, and you can see that a DB entry showing "no guns at 123 Main Street" is absolutely worthless.
AFAIK, an arrest warrant isn't required for felonies. It's required for misdemeanors unless the crime is witnessed by an officer. That may point towards this not being a major infraction to begin with. Either way, it really is looking more & more like harassment
Please define "partisan bungling" given that Florida has a lower death rate(1) and faster vaccine rollout(2) than the US average, while keeping schools open in accordance with expert recommendations.
"Fudging the numbers" is a vague accusation. If I arbitrarily add $1 to net profit on my company's annual report, then I've "cooked the books" but who cares.
If you read the emails related to this case, it's clear that the behavior she describes as "fudging the numbers" has no material impact on Florida's Covid-19 reporting.
You're correct, but I'm not saying they definitely fudged the numbers, or what method they might have used. I'm saying the allegation is that they fudged them, and therefore you can't simply point to the official numbers to support the claim that they did not fudge them. The way to refute that claim is with transparency and addressing this woman's specific complaints.
Of course the state isn't really obligated to refute every claim made against them, but whether they do it don't, I'm only saying that the state is only denying her claim, snot actual evidence to support their counter claim of no manipulation of the data.
People also need to realize the numbers may look identical now but they were manipulated and changed a lot before the election and after. It was plain as day manipulation. Now that this is exposed DeSantis had to fix the numbers back to reality and he’s paying Rebekah Jones back for making his life difficult.
It does, but it’s also SOP with the police, if someone speaks out against them or if they come up empty handed charge them with something so as to not look stupid.
Probably millions of instances. I think I'd prefer the state not announce what it is charging people with. Once she's charged, she should be able to say so. But consider the possibility one is falsely accused of rape. In my case, I'd want the charge kept private until the courts sorted things out. Or until I was falsely imprisoned at least.
A basic aspect of the court system is the public should know what the court is doing. The last thing you want is secret courts and secret police disappearing people. At any rate the charges will be public after she is arrested as required by law.
An accused person can and should be able to say whatever she wants about her accusations and the process. There are instances where they can't in the US and I think that is wrong. I'm not arguing in favor of secret courts. I'm arguing in favor of preserving a person's reputation until and unless the person can be proven guilty. Or at least until facts have been reasonably well established in court.
> How can you pass judgement without knowing all the facts?
From the article, and quite shocking:
> The Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed there is a warrant for Jones’ arrest but said it cannot disclose what charges she faces until she is in custody.
If you read the facts available, it appears that this isn’t the case at all, and it seems that we’re being sold a politically motivated narrative once again.
In what sane world do you merit a police raid for publishing public health data?
Assuming the worst that she accessed a computer she was not authorized to access. This data, in the aggregate, is public data.
Regardless innocent until proven guilty applies. And to date the state hasn’t even made their charges public which seems ridiculous. ‘I have an arrest warrant for you, but I can’t tell you the charge’.
Some personal medical data is very sensitive, and for a good reason. I am not claiming that this is true in this case, and the state does have to argue and prove why it decided that both the search and the arrest were justified; but it is also not clear at this point that there is no case either.
Publishing public, aggregated, anonymous health data should not be a cause for this arrest; and I hope the judge that signed the warrant understands this. So there must be a different explanation and the state must provide it, and quickly.
> And to date the state hasn’t even made their charges public which seems ridiculous. ‘I have an arrest warrant for you, but I can’t tell you the charge’.
As I understand it, the police can tell _her_ the charges, but they cannot make the details of the warrants public until she has been processed. After that it becomes public record with the court.
This is itself an issue, because websites scrape court documents and re-publish the information as a service. They then charge a service fee to have the information removed, even in cases where the charges have been dropped.
I don't know what the laws or policies are in Florida for such things. I can see a privacy right being violated I the case where a state reveals the subject of a warrant that could be mistakenly issued. For example, if someone used my wifi to download child porn and the cops executed a search warrant on my computers, I would absolutely not want want them to make any public statement.
In typical comment section fashion most of the people including yourself don't know anything about the details of this case.
She was accessing a system that she was not supposed to access anymore including for messaging employees of the state of Florida. she was no longer an employee and was using the system to send out mass text messages.
They traced her IP and sent police to knock on her door with a search warrant. She would not open the door for over an hour so they eventually went into her home with more aggressive force. Her entire story for 2020 has been driven by her original termination due to her conflict with the data science team. She was making updates to the dashboard without their permission or approval and was terminated. Then when this happened she made a claim that is not substantiated that her conflict with the data science team was driven by a desire to hide data from the public on the part of the state. This was in May. The figures she claims were being hidden never materialized because it was never actually true. she had claimed tens of thousands more people had died than the state was reporting which was completely untrue.
The reality is that the partisan press and numerous partisan actors used her as a useful idiot to attack their political enemy Governor DeSantis. All of this was around this narrative that Florida must have far more deaths and infections because they were opening up more aggressively than other states with high death counts and infection rates. The reality is that the data is pretty clear and states like California aren't doing better than Florida in any metrics.
The most problematic element to all of this has been her shameless self-promotion that appeals to conspiracy theorist and others. And let's be clear: the media started calling her a data scientist to bolster credibility for their partisan attacks against DeSantis and that's the primary reason.
I would welcome any HN reader to look at the state statistics on covid especially per capita and wonder why the media treatment of certain states has been completely different than other states that have identical statistics. I have done so and the biggest driver I have found has been the political party of the governor. Illinois has not done well. California is not doing well. Florida has done far better than it should given its elderly population. Georgia is not markedly worse than other states, but media called their decision to open in the spring "an experiment in human sacrifice."
So in other words, that's what you want to believe, so you will believe it without any actual facts. Ignorant people like you worsen the division in America.
No it isn't. She was paid as a web developer by the state. Simultaneously, the state has actual data scientists it was paying to look at this data and provide analysis.
I'm open to the idea she was and is a data scientist, nevertheless the state was not paying her for that. It was paying her to publish on official state website(s) data and analysis provided by the state's official, paid data scientists.
>>with dual degrees in earth science and journalism in 2012
>>received a dual master's degree in geography and mass communication
>>where she completed course work with an emphasis on data science and was working on a doctoral dissertation titled Using Native American Sitescapes to Extend the North American Paleotempestological Record Through Coupled Remote Sensing and Climatological Analysis
What does that have to do with anything? Her job was a web developer, not a data scientist. None of those qualify her to understand statistics better than the plethora of those employed by the state that are working diligently.
Plenty of employees have been let go for spreading falsities around COVID, most having been on the other side (COVID isn’t real etc). These behaviors are absolutely unacceptable and are dangerous.
>>where she completed course work with an emphasis on data science and was working on a doctoral dissertation titled Using Native American Sitescapes to Extend the North American Paleotempestological Record Through Coupled Remote Sensing and Climatological Analysis.
>None of those qualify her to understand statistics better than the plethora of those employed by the state that are working diligently.
Is your society really that stupid that you have to be a specialist to understand statistics?
Taking a stats class does not a data scientist make. COVID statistics can be very very difficult to interpret, especially at the beginning when data was scarce.
Edit to add example :
For instance, most people agree it is best to exclude totally random testing sites from COVID numbers because even though the false positive rate is very low, at the beginning so was the incidence of COVID which means most of the positive tests would be false positive.
Including them or improperly dealing with that data would be considered base rate fallacy
COVID statistics can be very very difficult to interpret correctly, especially at the beginning when data was scarce.
For instance, most people agree it is best to exclude totally random testing sites from COVID numbers because even though the false positive rate is very low, at the beginning so was the incidence of COVID which means most of the positive tests would be false positive.
Including them or improperly dealing with that data would be considered base rate fallacy
Proper interpretation of even the simplest data is easy to get wrong. For example, I routinely see smart, well-informed people describe the number of Covid deaths reported in a day as the number of people who died of Covid that day.
Yeah; some sibling comments here say Covid stats are difficult to interpret, but cite phenomena (non random samples, false positives, conflation of population and sample statistics, etc) that should be covered by any reasonable introductory statistics course.
In the US, that’s first or second year undergrad territory. Overseas, it’s often covered in high school.
It’s particularly depressing that science reporters regularly get these things wrong.
I can’t imagine what (lack of) credentials are necessary to land such a job, but I often wonder if a basic understanding of statistics is a disqualifying credential.
Mods this is obviously a nix23 alt account which was already flagged in multiple places by mods for spamming flame bait. Both accounts post in the same places regularly.
But I’ll bite. The point of providing an example is to show how there can be unobvious effects that are specific to the medical field (and isn’t as simple as cases per day). It takes Doctors and statisticians working together to interpret this info correctly. And no not al the effects are covered in stats101 despite how the freshman may protest.
I see zero evidence of that, and it's a serious violation of the site guidelines to post like that. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. As it says there, if you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
One of the most important lessons I've learned from poring over this data is that 99% of the things that internet users describe as "obvious" are not only obvious but false. A strange phenomenon, and one we all need to work on overcoming if we're to have real conversation.
Lots of highly educated people are on opposite side that lockdowns are very unneeded and government is overplaying/lying about the severity including the one who founded most valuable space company.
It’s not that mathematicians have no clue of astrophysics, but that they aren’t working in that area and understanding the field enough to contravene decisions made by astrophysicists.
There’s a rationale around what is, and is not, included in case definitions and included in dashboards. It’s likely that these decisions are made by epidemiologists with not only specific training, but also access to much more data than the person who builds the dashboards.
Making a decision to include data in a visualization without understanding why is not a good idea because it’s common that people think they know what numbers mean, but only because they have limited visibility.
Having a degree in data science doesn’t mean that I’m a data scientist. If I’m hired in a web dev role, then I hope my input is received well and considered by epidemiologists in charge. And I hope they’d be able to spend time explaining the rationale behind their decisions.
This seems like a similar analogy where the build engineer decides to change the git repo because they know better than the dev team. Then someone reading the article says “well they have a PhD in computer science so they should know what they’re doing, it’s simple.”
A rabid credential-ist might point out Isaac Newton never got a Physics degree.
Credentialism: belief in or reliance on academic or other formal qualifications as the best measure of a person's intelligence or ability to do a particular job
I’m not complaining that she lacks credentials. Someone else brought up irrelevant credentials to try to bolster her image. I’m complaining about that.
Which of those degrees qualifies her as a data scientist capable of contravening WHO recommendations?
Moreover, she is repeatedly referred to in the press as a data scientist, but all accounts of her actual work are that of a dashboard developer. Having done both myself, I can attest that they are very different types of work warranting very different training.
> Which of those degrees qualifies her as a data scientist capable of contravening WHO recommendations?
Literally all of her research involved gathering and communicating relevant insights from vast and disparate data sets, which is the role you just described.
> Having done both myself, I can attest that they are very different types of work warranting very different training.
She's educated as a data scientist specific to a given field. No different than a rocket scientist running numbers at a hedge fund. And I'd argue training v. education are vastly different; education gives context to job-specific training.
> Pedantically pointing out that, literally, this is a false statement.
My statement is so generic as to be true in the context of fields involving scientific research. And that's in essence the point: that's what data science is in the end.
This isn't an attempt to incense those with Data Scientist in their job title or job description, but it's why so many STEM folks can easily find homes in Data Science without formal education on the topic.
Not really, I don’t think all her research involved gathering and communicating relevant insights. There’s lots of other parts of research.
Also, data science is a sort of generic term and trying to generalize to any form of common characteristics is not very productive. I’m not aware of any certified curricula for data science or accreditation bodies so it’s kind of a marketing label assigned to everything from boot camps to GIS programs.
I think this is positive since lots of people work with data. But it’s problematic to assume that it means anything other than someone wants to signal that they work with data.
> Not really, I don’t think all her research involved gathering and communicating relevant insights. There’s lots of other parts of research.
But that is, in fact, the definition of research ("the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions") and the publication of research findings fits the definition of communication.
I guess my point is: if you're going to be pedantic on the internet, you should consider whether it's worth your time defending your own contribution. I've got no qualms defending the idea that Rebekah Jones is a data scientist.
> She's educated as a data scientist specific to a given field.
> [data scientist] is the role you just described.
No. She's not a data scientist and she herself doesn't even make this claim [1] Her job titles were: 1) GIS Analyst and 2) Geographic Information Systems Manager. Both are systems/dev roles. Clearly, neither is a position from which one is qualified to contravene the WHO.
Her degrees (per her own LinkedIn page) are in Geography. Take a look at the degree requirements at Syracuse (which offers both a BA and a BS (Jones earned the BA option)) [2] and LSU [3]. Next, go look at a few DS job postings and tell me the requirements are aligned (they are not).
I'm sure Jones is smart. I'm sure Jones is well versed in Geography. But she's not a data scientist. Even if she were, her skills and experience would not qualify her to overrule WHO guidance.
You know what GIS means? Geo INFORMATION System....Analyst.
Not many other Fields produces more Data then geo...maybe Weather...that's more complicated data (and hard to interpret) as most people who claim the title Data Scientist will ever see.
>But she's not a data scientist.
Stop with that it's no even a real job, it's a base training. Do you really think a Data Scientist has any plan what Cern Data s even mean...no.
I don't think the degrees you've cited necessarily make one a data scientist. I think doing data scientist work makes you a data scientist. So it may well be best to consider her a data scientist based on her current work or even if it is more of a hobby, even if your degree argument isn't the one I'd use.
Nevertheless, Ms. Jones was paid as a web developer by the state, not as a data scientist, and if she was publishing data she thought was important at the expense of data the state's paid data-scientists thought were important, she had to be fired.
What if Ms. Jones was taking advantage of her position as a web developer and publishing her work as a hobbyist data scientist that showed masks are ineffective at the expense of the data science work of official state data scientists who were saying they are likely to be helpful? I'd still consider her a data scientist, I just would want the state to be able to fire her.
Well in Pakistan the do that with Pilots without a license ;) But beeing Cern your Data Scientist is probably a Particle-physicist or a Scientific-Programmer, and so on...
1) People on HN say the person isn't educated, so you link her degrees in varying fields (not statistics or epidemiology).
2) People on HN say that those fields are irrelevant to her work, so you explain their relevance to the field of statistics.
3) People say on HN that credentials don't matter as long as you're doing the work of a data scientist, at which point you declare the importance of a relevant degree to the field.
So, which is it that draws importance? The college-level education of any kind, or the credentials that establish the doctor?
I find your opinions to be largely at-odds with one another.
Personally : I don't care at all about credentials if the quality is there. With regards to this specific case, i'll wait until the facts are in -- but it rubs me the wrong way that authorities don't want to speak of her charges even though she's available and willing to cooperate from what I read in the article.
P.S. I share your pain with those that edit comments in a dishonest way post-reply. It's a real problem on HN.
-I just said that she is probably perfectly capable of interpreting simple data.
-That you don't have to be a "data scientist" to understand simple data.
-Data Scientist is not a real Job but a base training (learn tooling and a bit statistic)
-A Mathematician/statistician/scientific-programmer has probably more of a clue what data's and statistics are and how to interpret them then any "based trained data-scientist".
-If it's so complicated you would need a specialized covid-data-scientist/mathematician, but it's NOT....compared to let's say, what Surgeons do...hence the degree in Medicine, with specialization on surgery.
I did not say she's wrong or right, but to say that someone has no clue because he/she is not even specialized in "fill in occupation" or employed as "fill in occupation" is just plain wrong, and shuts down every other opinion.
Just look for a example at Apollo 1, a fireman or chemist would have probably said: WHAT! filling the Cabin with pure oxygen is a terrible idea!!
But he's/she is not a Astronaut, Doctor or Rocket Scientist. With the logic here, he's maybe capable of understanding rocket-fuel or how to put out fires, but has no clue of humans and what they need in space...and he's not even employed as Human-equipment-specialist.
I have a friend who works in intelligence who said Fauci was corrupt and callous in April. In regards to all the profiteering in testing.
Love how our society has become so welcoming of “CIA officers” on CNN and the media just merged with the political corrupt aspect of the IC. Neoliberal rackets.
The cynic in me sees her defending herself from criminal charges for the next several years, then being unsuccessful in a civil suit due to no smoking gun of malicious prosecution for a few years after that, and ultimately no one will remember or care, and DeSantis will be out of work or on to another job, but he’s effectively solved this problem.
I am a data scientist who spent June in Tallahassee helping coordinate state-wide COVID testing with FDEM (Florida Department of Emergency Management) and state health officials.
Everyone I worked with was pretty dedicated to getting the roll out right (including the governor and his appointees too..)
My data & work was spread far and wide with no issue - but just a personal anecdote
Agreed--as a Florida resident, I have heard a variety of highly-charged opinions on this story from many of my fellow residents, but very few hard facts to confirm or deny any particular narrative.
I think the raid on Ms. Jones home was a grotesque and unwarranted use of police force, but I also think her "whistle-blowing" story is highly questionable based on the facts available.
It’s fairly easy to reconcile the opinions “I’m not sure if she has done something criminal” and “the police used excessive and intentionally intimidating force when other safer options were open to them”.
I'd suggest you have a look at how policing is done outside of USA. A raid on someone's home is almost never justified - it would take highly exceptional circumstances to make a "normal" police force perform like that.
Raids are common in almost every European country - which in general have "normal" police forces - where the police believe someone might destroy evidence.
Nonsense. There's a world of difference between a couple of cops knocking on your door and a full squad of fully armed, fully armoured militarised faux-soldiers busting down your door and threatening to shoot you, your family and your pets - and often following through on those threats.
Police knocking on your door is not a raid - the element of surprise is the defining factor, from the US to anywhere in Europe to an infantry section in Kandahar.
You claim above that raids are unique to the US and its abnormal police, but now the claim has morphed into the manner in which they are conducted that's different.
Even in Ireland, where police are routinely unarmed and gun crime is rare, if there's a reasonable suspicion that a suspect may have firearms, a police raid will involve nearly identical weapons and equipment to a US SWAT team.
I think you have an unrealistic view of policing outside of the US. There are no police forces that do not conduct raids.
The militarisation of police is separate problem, and the solution is not going to involve removing the tactics that the so-called normal police forces rely on.
You're going to see surprise raids in any country whenever the police believe there's evidence to be found that would be destroyed or tampered with if the suspect had advance notice.
I don't know what the raid on Ms. Jones house was about and am going to reserve judgment until I do. There's just so much weirdness. She calls herself a data scientist, which she may well consider herself to be, but the state appears to have hired her as a website developer, and fired her as a website developer, because she refused to put out data in her capacity as a web developer that the state's paid, official data scientists were giving her.
I guess you could consider her a whistleblower. But it's unclear the state did anything wrong other than a) insist that the numbers from its data scientists be published on a state website instead of Ms. Jones's and b) protect its emergency communication system by investigating abuses of same by what to me, at least, looks like a very likely suspect.
+1. Also for that raid alone where public saw SWAT team members putting machine guns in her children faces, she most likely will settle and get $10MM+ settlement in less than 10 years. Of course our taxpayers money. DegenerateSantis will be then on his next high paid gig. Watch and see.
>Also for that raid alone where public saw SWAT team members putting machine guns in her children faces
Uhh what? The only video I've seen has an officer walking around with a handgun drawn and pointing it as he moves around her house, and at one point he aims it upstairs where her kids are.
How does this get telephone-gamed into "SWAT team members putting machine guns in her children faces"?? Is there some other video I haven't seen?
It is a weird story. I do not think she is being targeted for speaking her mind or advocating a particular view of the COVID, the charges almost certainly are for accessing the non-public data she should not have accessed.
And some data is sensitive. For example, if someone was pulling private medical records and harassing or blackmailing another person with that information it would, to me, justify both the search and the potential arrest. It should not be the statistics about COVID -- that data is usually available to the public after some aggregation.
That said, the state response and the arrest warrant look very strange in this case; so strange that it smells of a personal vendetta (e.g., find a potential HIPAA violation and throw a book at her). I hope the state will clearly identify what the heck she is accused of accessing and why it is so damaging that the state resorted to its recent actions. My 2c.
> For example, if someone was pulling private medical records and harassing or blackmailing another person
I think it's highly unlikely that a state data analyst would have access to any private medical records. The Covid stats would have probably already been aggregated by the hospitals before they were sent to the state.
> find a potential HIPAA violation and throw a book at her
HIPAA is a federal law, so a violation of it wouldn't be prosecuted by the state of Florida.
“ Lawyer's fees, private investigators, an armed security guard for my home since the police published my home address and contact information online, moving expenses so my family can get out of the Governor's reach, and any costs associated with this fight that I may not be anticipating. My family and I will need to move and get set up in a new place.”
Holy hell it’s like she pulled a Snowden or something. All she did was be good at her job and tell the truth. Just another reason for me to never live in Florida.
All she did was be good at her job and tell the truth.
What "truth" do you think she was exposing? The original dispute that caused her to leave her job was a boring technical dispute about whether to automatically publish data from PDFs or to have it reviewed for accuracy first: https://polimath.substack.com/p/a-long-one-about-the-florida.... Despite insinuations from various irresponsible media figures, there is zero evidence that Florida is falsifying data.
There was also some controversy of counting those that died in Florida but were not residents of Florida. A marginal difference, but not anything that big.
Her “data” that she publishes on her website was always within 5% of what my Florida county publishes, and within the same margin of what I see on NYT or any other website. I say it’s close enough, so she didn’t expose diddly squat. What she did do is access a state computer system without authorization. That’s a crime, and her guilt or innocence will play out in court... like with other crimes.
There’s no story here, except about a hysterical, attention-seeking woman who poked the wrong bear. Good luck to her. If nothing else, I hope she learns a lesson.
I always laugh at people who press issues like this. It's as if they never prodded authority in high school. In high school, typically the worst case scenario is you get detention or suspension. In the real world, you get sued or go to jail.
It makes me glad I did bureaucratic rebellion then. I learned quickly that the powers that be will never concede to you, people quickly disperse or disown you the moment you need help fighting something, and ideals are worthless things fighting for short of endless mass mobs demanding it.
She had some procedural complaints as well, but she's since started publishing her own "defudged" data tracker at floridacovidaction.com, and as far as I've heard it's never reported any huge difference from the state's numbers.
The previous allegation against her was something that would make her the hero even if she was guilty. It was a charge of "making good trouble", albeit one that would put her away for a long time under the CFAA.
While the State has handled this case wrong, she is not innocent in this. She made a bunch of drama about her interpretation of the data, which was, at best, no better than the State's method, and more likely, she was flat-out wrong. She is mostly a drama queen making a crazy mess.
The State of Florida has handled the case in a Hollywood-level of bungling, thuggish ineptitude. Both sides in this case are dirty. As an active Floridian, I've followed the Covid numbers closely, and at first her story was deeply worrying. But her actual data arguments are idiotic. She doesn't understand data analysis at all. Meanwhile the State acts like the Mafia. Ron DeSantis has been one of the dumber governers we've had, and that's saying something. Regardless of her, I'd love to see him impeached over this.
My interpretation is that she's not the whistleblower she claims to be, and in fact has unfairly cast a dark shadow over the work of everyone else involved in Florida's Covid-19 dashboard through her accusations.
Honestly, I think she was just attributing sinister motives to fairly inane bureaucratic decisions about data and reporting. But once she decided to go on CNN and lob accusations, this whole fiasco turned into a political Rorschach test that is completely unmoored from the underlying reality.
I've been watching with some interest, and feel like I don't know anywhere near the whole story. We all look for "good guys" and "bad guys" to make sense of a narrative, but I come away with the feeling that Ms Jones is not solidly in the former camp. One data point I have for this is the way she tears down others who are doing their best work, for example a very public feud with Emily Oster: https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1344067350216265729
We have some serious work to do. I'm very hopeful that we're going to have a very solid team at the national leadership level in 3 days, after a year of a vacuum, but I'm still concerned about state and local levels. I don't think these types of personality fights are very helpful.
Calling a woman a drama queen is not sexist. Just like calling a dumb man a meathead.
It would be sexists to say "all women are drama queens." Police some other type of derogatory remark elsewhere please. You're adding nothing to the conversation.
this is way too optimistic for the US criminal justice system. police and prosecutors regularly lie on warrant applications, and judges regularly grant the flimsiest of justifications for search and arrest warrants. there is no legal accountability whatsoever: the most that defense attorneys can usually do in the case of illegal search warrants is to have the illegally seized evidence excluded; there is no punishment for the state using its immense power to harass and intimidate individuals.
If a cop willfully lies on a warrant they are generally civilly liable. I am by no means saying that no one in the criminal justice systems acts unethically. But if a judge signs a warrant for someone's arrest there is almost always good reason to suspect they committed a crime.
yes, and if a cop murders a civilian they are (supposed to be) liable, but innumerable news stories over the past... long time have shown that not to be the case far too often.
I actually can think of no case where a cop clearly shot someone in bad faith and wasn't ultimately charged. It's much more often the case that the cop has some plausible argument that they made a bad decision in good faith. Which makes the cases very hard to prosecute. It's pretty seldom the case that prosecutors corruptly ignore clear cut misconduct.
There are flaws in the justice system. And by no means is it totally fair. But in this sort of situation, where a judge has seen the evidence and issued a warrant, usually there is usually something there. It's very possible this is selective prosecution. But, I'll bet you a good sum of money at even odds that there's probable cause she committed a crime.
I think the right move is to defer judgment until the charges come out, but it’s a real possibility. Computer crimes are notoriously vulnerable to selective prosecution depending on how much the prosecutors don’t like you; in most states, Florida included, any unauthorized access to any computer system can be charged as a felony.
Unfortunately if anyone were to have their laptop and emails searched with an eye towards coming up with probable cause to make an arrest, no one is safe.
Just as it’s realistically impossible to not break driving laws while behind the wheel, giving pretext to a traffic stop, the same is true if you give people looking to get you a huge swath of your life.
They have her ip address [1]. It is super easy to prosecute with her ip address marked on the sent message. I feel bad for her, but, why hand the prosecution so much (use a vpn)? This is like driving drunk with your headlights off. At this point, she will have to plead out.
"An affidavit for the warrant claims that an unauthorized message sent from a state emergency management account on Nov. 10 was traced to an IP address associated with Jones."
What is the law that sending an anonymous messages saying "be a hero" breaks? It seems at worst to be spam and a raid for spamming a small number of people seems very heavy handed...
>After she was fired, Jones started her own online COVID-19 dashboard. But she said Saturday that she may no longer be allowed access to computers, the internet or other electronic devices as a condition of her release from jail pending trial.
In the modern day, with so much that is online or involving computers, this should be considered unjust punishment, the likes of which should be reserved only for child molesters.
Not speaking to the rest of the story. However, this by itself troubles me.
It is curious that this sort of restriction is possible. I don't think I could pay most of my monthly bills without the internet, for example. I assume there's also many jobs that require home internet.
If she were providing a bogus view of the pandemic, there could be consequences for public health. That doesn't seem to actually be the case as far as I can tell, but the magnitude of the punishment seems about right for the alleged crime.
I suppose you're being cynical or are joking. Literally millions of US citizens would have to be arrested if that was crime. AFAIK, she's being arrested for having accessed government databases after she had been fired, or something similar to that for which she was not fully authorized.
Providing a bogus view of the pandemic is mainstream US politics. You only get this kind of repressive treatment if you've embarrased the government, in this case the state of Florida.
How about blacklisting people from monetary/financial services such as banks and credit card co's based on their political views? That goes even further.
So, you don't like him, but that has nothing to do with the principle of banning people from society based on legal speech which is the point I'm making. This sort of behavior is toxic to society at large, and so are the implications. I'm glad your political views are of the correct sort....today. Oh, wikipedia.
The modern examples of a gay couple being refused service is a poor example. They can’t just go to the other financial institutions, because all of them have black-listed them. An Internet business cannot feasibly operate on cash alone.
Just like any farmer in the 1800s can just go lay his own railroad tracks across the continent, every website that hosts wrongthink is equally capable of creating their own banks, payment processors, data centers, and internet connections. These businesses aren’t restaurants. They’re critical, privatized infrastructure.
If you become a public figure based on a toxicity and bigotry businesses may not want to be associated with you.
Patreon is not a bank. Patreon didn't even exist a few years ago. They are a middle man to collect money using other middle men. They don't even have a monopoly on this.
> that has nothing to do with the principle of banning people from society based on legal speech
Your comment is bizarre and nonsensical. No one has been "banned from society" based on "legal speech", a meaningless phrase.
A lot of people have been banned from using specific internet services because they used them to make threats of violence, or to tell dangerous lies about COVID.
This isn't "banning them from society". Get a grip!
Also, we are talking two classes of people here:
* people who work against humanity to spread COVID-19 based on a pack of obvious lies
* people who wish to violently overthrow the elected US government based on a pack of obvious lies
and frankly, these people can get fucked. They are destroying the country and the planet, and they deserve every single penalty the law can give them.
If private corporations, which Republicans claim to love, use their perfectly legal power to stop doing business with horrible psychopaths, then good for them.
One side went crazy, and now we have to choose sides.
Are you on the side of the delusional hateful lawbreaking violent psychopaths, or with the majority?
People were banned from financial services for growing weed and being sex workers, largely at the request of the right. And now the right is complaining this is coming back to them.
I'd draw the line at supervised access to conversation with normal people at: if someone is in jail maybe (this is a DIFFERENT debatable topic, beyond this context) their other rights are also suspended during the sentence.
Someone whom is not in jail, who is otherwise allowed to participate in society; abridging their rights of freedom of speech, expression, and discourse with others? That seems over-broad.
IOT - so if she uses some chipped sneaker to count steps, she is in violation. Now that is a law that nobody can follow in modern times.
Ring a door bell at a neighbour - you are in violation.
There should be a amendments to all constitution, that no law is valid, that can not be followed by a citizen with reasonable effort.
The whole copyright violation criminalization started this pattern of laws, that every citizen can assumed to be in violation of.
And if everyone is in violation of such a law, the state is free to choose which violations are prosecuted and which are not. Capriciousness. One of many assaults on democracy, coming in a nice disguise.
This comment thread is an example of social media at its absolute worst. Have an opinion? Big deal, everyone has an opinion. My advice is to keep it to yourself.
I mean, isn’t part of the reason we have comments is to discuss opinions? The majority (though not all) of the comments I’m reading here are saying that there’s not enough information to form a good, educated one.
There’s a lot of talk in this thread of whether Jones is a data scientist or not, but that talk is missing something crucial - it doesn’t take a data scientist to assemble basic reports about infection rates and mortality. Little to none of what differentiates “data scientist” from “data analyst” or “statistician” is involved in these reports. There is no massive data, no black-box modeling, really no new statistics at all - this stuff is well defined, except for the data itself.
The main choice points are around specific decisions with regards to how interpret messy data. Those decisions require domain expertise and a deep familiarity with how various public agencies in Florida work. Perhaps Jones has that expertise, perhaps she doesn’t. A title of “data scientists” doesn’t change that.
Excellent point. And important to remember that her claims really circle around interpretation.
Measuring her claims really requires knowledges of how the state made its interpretation. If those interpretations don't correspond to how most other data outside of Florida is counted, then there is a problem.
This is why data transparency is so important: Accurately understanding regional and nation trends can help inform where resources are dedicated and how the virus spreads.
Right now, she is apparently an activist. There is nothing wrong with being an activist. However, IMHO, being a "data scientist" is inherently incompatible with being an activist. No matter how qualified you were, once you became a passionate activist, you are no longer a "data scientist" or a "data analyst" or a "statistician" on the topic. Again, there is nothing wrong with being an activist, but you can't be both. I feel this is so obvious that requires no further explanation, but I might get massive downvotes for saying this.
You didn't support your argument with any explanation, so there's no room for "wow" non-statements when people interpret your argument in a way that you don't understand.
Your argument appeared to be that someone who is an activist can't also have a role that requires discipline and focus while interpreting messy data. In that case, there's no difference between that person being a data scientist or a medical professional.
Do you care to expand on your argument, and perhaps provide support as to why, for example, it's okay for a medical professional to also be an activist but not for a data scientist or tax accountant? Where's the line, and why?
I'm an activist about childhood poverty and education. This makes its way into my data science work because I pursue projects and analyses that allow me to understand how poverty affects education progress. I often explicitly state my biases, because I am sure my interpretation of data is colored by my pre-existing beliefs. Yet, I often discover analyses that I wouldn't otherwise have considered due to my beliefs — and I have integrity — I continually update my beliefs based on data. So, on one hand I agree that being an activist can bias one's interpretation of data, but I also think that the biases can be essential for generating useful hypotheses to guide analysis.
> I feel this is so obvious that requires no further explanation, but I might get massive downvotes for saying this.
... you won't explain why you believe this and then complains that no explaining it will get you downvote?
You are aware that to be able to contest your logic, we need to be aware of your logic, right?
Okay so I'll make a guess, the fact that they defends a cause, their bias might affect how they present data? Is that why you believe they can't be a data scientist? That's a pretty naïve view of the world sadly. The fact that someone doesn't act like an activist, doesn't make them unbiased sadly. The only thing that it change is how aware you are from a potential bias.
Can you please define activism for me, in your own words?
I'd hate to try to utilize my legally protected free expression rights, but accidentally do activism instead, so any tips or tricks you have would be greatly appreciated.
"Florida Department of Law Enforcement officials said Rebekah Jones has been under investigation since early November after someone illegally accessed the state’s emergency alert health system...."
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