Cops raid home of ousted data scientist who created her own Florida COVID-19 dashboard Florida's state police on Monday morning raided the home of coronavirus tracker Rebekah Jones, seizing her electronics as part of a computer hacking investigation. Jones previously built a website displaying up-to-date COVID-19 virus infection stats for Florida’s Department of Health while working as a geographic information …
Bollocks.
It's Trump that's made the GOP ignore everything it supposedly stood for. It's Trump who's normalised ignoring inconvenient truths. It's Trump who's proved that it you wail loud enough the facts don't matter.
But the real problem here is his enablers. All the people who are supposed to be in positions of authority that don't know how to say "no" to a bully. Like the prick who ordered the pigs to shut down this troublesome priest, I mean scientist.
The fact that COVID 19 has been so heavily politicised over there is the problem. I've said it before, Trump isn't running a pandemic response, he's been running a re-election campaign. He's criticised mask wearing, social distancing, lockdowns, his chief medical experts, all because he wanted/needed the economy to be going well to make him look good. Facts have been trampled in preference of money in the name of "freedom". Freedom to go to work. Freedom to go to the pub. Freedom to not wear a mask. Freedom to spread a deadly disease.
Unfortunately, the enablers are a sizable proportion of the electorate - Trump won last time basically because enough voters chose to reject fact in favour of fantasy.
That applies in spades when it comes to Covid - a lot of people flatly reject the truth and there are votes in pandering to their beliefs.
All Trump did was to demonstrate that if you remove even the pretence of integrity from politics it is an electoral asset.
Its generally this way the world over at the moment, I sum it up in 3 words:
Preach - About about how everybody is hard-done by, and its not their personal responsibility
Point - The finger at somebody convenient, who can be target easily
Promise - To make naughty and nasty targets pay
What fuckin planet are you on?
Trump got the whitehouse because the alternative was an evil witch who happens to be in possession of an axe wound
Stop watching MsM
If this is what formulates your world view, you’re a dumb muppet, take my advice and try thinking for yourself
The 'Trump' bit is simply that she got sidelined when the figures trended the wrong way, ideologically speaking, and she refused to tweak them to match what was expected.
She's obviously mishandled this -- or someone has done so in her name -- but if it turns out that she's shut down just because her hardware went AWOL then it indicates a lack of precaution. (If I had sensitive data like this I'd have backup copies all over the place...hardware's cheap....)
>Come next January, who are you going to blame, for more of the same?
Trump is both a person and a symptom. In this case the blame isn't with Trump but Florida's governor, Ron deSantis, who is very much in the Trump mold (but a much more savvy political operator).
There are no absolutely correct Covid-19 death numbers worldwide. Part of it is defining the cause of death for someone who has a few nasty medical problems. Do you go with the underlying cause or the illness? How many late stage cancer patients are listed as dying of pneumonia not cancer? Also, how many messed up diagnoses are there for Covid-19? Honest people argue over these points and different organizations have differing answers for these questions.
Dimbulb's problem was not realizing the numbers are not completely accurate (never will be) like the final score of a rugby match but have issues built into them. They are roughly accurate, my navel says about 5% error rate overall. Good enough to give an accurate sense of the problem and general trends and rates. She thought there was a crime when in fact it is more likely the difficulties in determining the actual numbers and trying to correct for reporting/recording problems and trying to get them reported in a standard way to make them comparable with others' numbers.
“the numbers are not completely accurate (never will be) like the final score of a rugby match but have issues built into them. They are roughly accurate,”
I know scoring can be a bit confusing to those not familiar with Rugby and the number of points awarded for certain scoring actions are different between the two codes. But the final score is accurate, it is just a tally of points scored by each of the two teams it is not subject to things like rounding errors etc. I have never heard of a team demanding a recount because a try, conversion, penalty or drop goal had not been added to the tally of their score. But outside of that happening Rugby scores are accurate.
> I know scoring can be a bit confusing to those not familiar with Rugby [...] But the final score is accurate
I think the original author's point was exactly that - a rugby score is easily quantifiable as a single fixed number, whereas gathering statistics for the impacts of a disease is not.
I haven't looked into Florida's numbers, but even in the UK, there's a lot of shades of grey in the statistics.
E.g. the daily "people with coronavirus" stats are fairly quantifiable. You take the test which you either pass or fail, and we can then apply a bit of a fudge factor to account for "false positives/negatives".
Hey presto: 10,000 per day, +/- 5%.
But deaths are trickier.
We're currently measuring deaths based on whether they occurred within 28 days of being diagnosed with C19. As far as I'm aware, we don't then apply any further filtering based on whether C19 was the primary factor, or just a secondary one - or whether it wasn't actually a contributing factor.
Alternatively, you can look at total excess deaths - we're currently about running at about 70,000 deaths more than we would have expected.
But even then, this probably underplays the total deaths by a measurable margin. E.g. road deaths usually account for about 1% of all deaths, but have effectively dropped to zero during lockdown.
Similar for things like the flu. On the other hand, it's sadly likely that there's been increases in fatalities from other causes, not least thanks to the impact of lockdown on mental health, support services and employment/poverty.
So again, there has to be a fudge factor there, too.
So whatever figures you pick, you can be pretty much certain that someone'll spend lots of time arguing over whether they're correct or not. And for better or worse, a lot of people - especially politicians - will tend to prefer statistics which are towards the lower end of the scale.
Though looking at the way that the USA is likely this week to hit 3000 corona-related deaths a day (and rising), I don't think anyone can really argue that things are going well!
the daily "people with coronavirus" stats are fairly quantifiable. You take the test which you either pass or fail, and we can then apply a bit of a fudge factor to account for "false positives/negatives".
I don't think that's right. The number you get from that is "people who presented for a test and were found to be positive". The "people who have coronavirus" is a lot more nebulous and relies on randomised testing of large numbers of people and extrapolating those results to the population as a whole.
We're currently measuring deaths based on whether they occurred within 28 days of being diagnosed with C19. As far as I'm aware, we don't then apply any further filtering based on whether C19 was the primary factor, or just a secondary one - or whether it wasn't actually a contributing factor.
So, intuitively, you would think this would overestimate the actual deaths directly attributable to C19.
Alternatively, you can look at total excess deaths - we're currently about running at about 70,000 deaths more than we would have expected.
And this figure is always higher than the 28 days figure, so intuitively seems an even larger overestimate...
But even then, this probably underplays the total deaths by a measurable margin.
Hmmm... so the first two methods are underestimates after all?
I think I agree with your general point - that we are never going to have completely accurate figures for deaths due directly or indirectly to this new virus. I'm not sure an error of 5% or even 10% will matter in a few years' time - it never seems to have in the past.
The key points are probably "lots of people died" and "mistakes were made by all - governments, scientists and general public - which meant that more people died of CoViD 19 than should have done". After that it becomes a blame game and however much we despise <name a politician>'s policies, putting them on trial for crimes against humanity is likely a hiding to nothing, and would waste an awful lot of public money.
M.
"There are no absolutely correct Covid-19 death numbers worldwide. "
Perhaps not, but the best proxy is the number of deaths above the 5 year average (all causes)
Everything else can be massaged, Deaths are hard to cover up - but you're always going to be running about 5 days behind "today"
“Whaa whaa whaa, I hate trump”
Ok kiddo thats fine and all, I’m sure you’ll join the #MeToo march and tell all about how you were touched prior to landing some overpaid acting job for services rendered, but we’ll still all know that silly cunts exist and no laws can protect silly cunts from themselves!
It's certainly not new with Trump but the number of police actions, secret intelligence gathering and surveillance targets, and lawsuits against those who speak truth to power has radically increased over last four years. Ex officials, whistleblowers, reporters, scientists, and political opponents have all been targets.
When this whole thing is over it is going to come to light that the whole thing is based on fabricated evidence and bad actors in Florida government. Those alert systems in the United States have also been proven to be widely insecure in the past based on news reports and I don't think that has changed in recent years because of Republican incompetence. The government and the police of Florida need to be sued over this case.
Florida was one of those states that didn't do the testing just before the election to make the numbers look they were falling. Now they're doing testing, that fake trough is clear on all datasets:
See the "Active cases" trough around November 3rd for Florida?:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/
The dip is clear as day.
What would Republicans do for power?
Would they kill people? Even if those people are majority Republican voting elderly? Yes. This here. They intentionally allowed undiagnosed spreaders to spread this plague to others just to make the numbers look better. People caught the disease that didn't need to and died. Republicans knew that would happen, Republicans did it anyway.
So, 2020 election and you're supposed to question the result in Georgia, but Georgia has a fully audited system with paper ballots that can be counted by hand. That system was mandated by the courts after some questionable election results to restore confidence in the system. It's hard for Republicans to rig those machines, so they fell back to voter suppression:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/republican-vote-suppression-2020-scandal-georgia-s-primary-proved-it-ncna1231217
But in other Republican strongholds they've been actively buying riggable, paperless, audit trail less voting machines:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26856467/texas-voting-machines-paper-trail-states/
"[Rokey] Suleman [an election official in South Carolina] expressed dismay at the idea of continuing to purchase paperless equipment. “Why? Why? Especially with heightened sense of paranoia about outside influence into our election systems. We need to have a way to independently validate voters’ intent away from tabulation equipment. I don’t understand how any election official could really consider a totally paperless system in this day and age.”
"Shantiel Soeder, election and compliance administrator at Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, shared Suleman’s sentiment. “At the end of the day, we have that ballot that we can always go back to. We still find it important to print out receipts for other transactions in our lives. To have absolutely no paper, it’s almost irresponsible. These are people’s votes!”
So you think Republicans got 74 million votes? All these people came out in greater numbers than ever to support Republicans despite the staggering incompetence, the treason, the self dealing and broken promises??? They did that only in the riggable voting machines and not in the mail-in verfiable ballots? If you believe that then I have some Florida Coronavirus numbers just for you.
"Florida was one of those states that didn't do the testing just before the election to make the numbers look they were falling. Now they're doing testing, that fake trough is clear on all datasets:"
FWIW, looking at the provided link, the trough for both cases and deaths looks to be late Sept., not early November. It looks like it was climbing for at least a month leading to election day, and carried on rising at a similar rate after election day. While I agree with your general thrust, I think it's quite clear the "trough" is not useful evidence to bolster your case. Unless the claim is that the Republicans just got the timing wrong.
you are so off your rocker gramps. you got it all backwards, and history and current activity show the point. The criminal organizations (Democrats and Republicans) Republicans believe is smaller government - less regulating people. Democrats believe in bigger government, managing peoples lives down to what they are allowed to eat, drink and put on their own face.
Supposedly one is Freedom/less regulation, and the other Slavery/pets of the government.
However in the US the government is supposed to be The People (but it's currently corporations like google and AT&T) So we have greedy people (for a large part) running the government and not good people. Brings back the old saying, Power corrupts, Absolute power ~~~~~
Eliminate the parties/gangs, free the people from greed.
> Florida was one of those states that didn't do the testing just before the election to make the numbers look they were falling.
SOP in Florida. They rigged their unemployment system to make it extremely difficult to qualify for unemployment insurance and then tout how little unemployment there is in the state (as measured by those actually receiving UI payments).
It probably isn't going to come to light. Of course it is based on fabricated evidence, but if the people who fabricated the evidence continue to be in power, this will never come to light, any more than the corruption and idiocy behind the UK government's handling of CV19 will ever come to light.
Really? You think it's a secret they spaffed 12 BILLION quid on a barely functional track and trace system run by the buffoon who fucked up at TalkTalk? It's no secret.
We don't need to hide this stuff in the UK, our population are genuinely too thick to understand the news.
"You think it's a secret they spaffed 12 BILLION quid on a barely functional track and trace system"
No, but if you ask them questions about how much money they've spent on PPE and other things related to COVID, the answer is, "we don't know" ...
No, but if you ask them questions about how much money they've spent on PPE and other things related to COVID, the answer is, "we don't know" ...
Is that inclusive or exclusive of the PPE that was not even usable?
No, it's not a secret. But the situation is much more complex than that.
There are three notions of 'truth': (1) is a thing actually objectively true? (2) is a thing generally believed to be true? (3) has the state sanctioned it as being true?
All of these things are independent today. What I meant by 'coming to light' is that the first and third of these things should be the case. It's not enough for the thing to be true, or for people to know is true (still less for people to 'know it is true' when it is in fact false): unless it is blessed as 'true' by Dominic Cummings Trump Boris the state it has not come to light. Similarly things which are blessed as 'true' by the state but which are not actually true have not come to light: they're just state-sanctioned lies.
In your example: yes, the UK government did actually spend billions of pounds on a track and trace system which did not work, and yes, this was due to incompetence and corruption, and yes, everyone knows both these things, but no, it is not a Boris state-sanctioned 'truth': the state-sanctioned 'truth' will be that some lower sum of money was spent, that the system worked reasonably well, and that there was no corruption involved.
The state-sanctioned 'truth' matters because, given the state is busily ensuring that there is no independent legal system (the judges and lawyers are, of course, enemies of the state people), if the state chooses not to sanction something as 'true' then there is nothing you can do about that.
"You need to calm down now"
* proceeds to scream up stairs and point weapons in the direction of her family *
(Oh thanks officer, I feel calmer already).
Textbook example of why US cops need more de-escalation training and less thug training.
"You need to calm down now"
* proceeds to scream up stairs and point weapons in the direction of her family *
Coincidently, I was watching that story on CNN while reading your comment. There is a noticeable edit and therefore indeterminate time between the actions you stated above. I've no idea if that edit is what we are all seeing or if CNN made that edit to shorten the overall video length (or to spin it more onto their own "message")
@Blazde
If you listen to the video, the officer repeated an order from another officer to come downstairs, saying "COME down now". Not "calm down".
Ordering other family members to come down so that the cops can prevent them from potentially destroying or hiding evidence seems like a prudent step to preserve evidence and avoid a possible confrontation upstairs as the cops search the place.
He says 'calm down' three times at the beginning of the video (I did quote it slightly wrong though).
Aiming the guns just wasn't a prudent step, and the idea they need to prevent destroying of evidence so urgently doesn't jive with FDLE's claim they waited outside for 20 minutes for her to open the door. Nope, they just have this whole 'must gain authority over situation with shock and awe' mindset and that actually increases the possibility of confrontation because it pisses everyone off, and you can't tell them it doesn't work because they enjoy doing it too much.
Although not apparently state-sanctioned, the levels of racism, violence against minorities and actions by the police would possibly have resulted in South Africa-levels of sanctions imposed against the USA once upon a time.
I wonder how long it will be before someone (China?) manipulates everyone else into instigating "Boycott America", as a "social awareness" campaign.
The within 28 days limitation was introduced because the original, hasty definition was really ill thought-out. According to that if you died after a positive test you were added to the statistics. If you were hit by a car leaving the test centre you became one of the COVID count. If you died of old age decades later you'd have become part of the count. It was a definition that ensured that sooner or later 100% of those with positive tests would be defined as having died of it.
There are other definitions such as COVID being mentioned on the death certificate and the ONS figure of deaths in excess of the average for time of year. The Beeb reports these as well but they are not available on a daily basis, only the deaths within 28 days. When reporting these statistics they're properly labelled; this isn't some form of casting aspersions, it's simply good practice.
The point is, much like the original no cut-off metric, the 28 days cut-off doesn't make sense on any medical basis. It's know to be a substantial underestimate, and it's use is politically driven.
The government scientists' preferred metric is the 60 day cut-off plus those with Covid mentioned on death certificate even after 60 days, and you don't have to study the numbers long to see it's a much better estimate. That figure is still published on a weekly basis (it's currently about 13.5% higher) but you'll never hear a minister mention it and all the press releases, graphs, daily figures and so on contain the 30-day figure which is explicitly called the 'headline indicator'. It may as well be called the 'propaganda number'.
One of the issues with being so sensitive to the timing of a patient's first positive test is that it screws the trend as availability of testing changes.
For example: in April a typical patient may not get a positive test until 2 weeks after infection once they were admitted (and some were dying without any test), after which they had a full further 4 weeks to pass away and still be counted. Over the summer the greater test availability meant more were positive long before they got to hospital and may have had only 14 days in ICU to pass away and be counted. By October the timing of your first test depended on where you lived and your willingness/ability to drive for hours. This isn't the characteristic of a stable metric.
The 60-day metric is much less sensitive to first test timing because almost all those who will die from Covid have done so within 60 days of infection (that's significantly less true for 28 days). Plus if they die without a test they'll eventually be counted in that metric via the death certificate criteria.
My preference would be having it mentioned on the death certificate as the sole criterion. Otherwise the "hit by car on leaving the test centre" problem is still there. In the early days there could have been a problem with a doctor misdiagnosing some other respiratory illness as COVID or vice versa when there was insufficient testing capacity but that's not going to be a problem now. However the GRO isn't going to process death certs quickly enough for monitoring purposes.
"the ONS figure of deaths in excess of the average for time of year. ""
Even that figure is suspect, since deaths from some other causes, eg road traffic accidents, murders, dipped significantly over the 1st lockdown period. The additional hygiene and mask wearing will also be having an effect of other contact or airborne transmissible diseases. Of course, this probably means the numbers of COVID deaths is higher than the ONS figures.
"since deaths from some other causes, eg road traffic accidents, murders, dipped significantly over the 1st lockdown period"
Interesting. Do you have a source for your numbers?
According to my data source (ONS England/Wales only) - and I am rounding up the numbers here - the daily road death figure is 5 and the murder figure is 2. That's 7 per day. How many days was lockdown 1? Well your mileage may vary - but those 7 (maximum non-deaths) against the overall deaths, suggests your source is wrong - and by a very large margin.
The only hard figures I have are 1770 deaths for 2018 and 1752 for 2019. For 2020, I'm remembering Grant Shapps (in a Parliamentary Committee hearing IIRC) stating road deaths were down "70%", pro rata during at least the first part of the lockdown starting in march.
That is a very small number in the overall death rate, but there have been news reports claiming some decrease in non-COVID death rates, but it's likely we won't have any real hard and fast numbers until next year when the ONS does it's reports.
Having said that, the "excess deaths" number is calculated by looking at death rates higher than expected for the time of year based on the averages of previous years. So, again, we don't really know for sure what the actual excess death rates are yet because we don't know yet if this years "expected" deaths rates have changed.
Anyway, all that said, I accept your point that the figures/estimates/guess may well b e wrong, I Donald Trump your claim with "well, I said THOSE deaths dropped significantly, not necessarily that the number is significant in the grand picture :-p
Excess deaths also includes deaths due to COVID taking up medical resources that could have been deployed elsewhere.
Yup. I think it's both simple, and complicated. So one measure for excess mortality is just to compare annual or seasonal death rates & see how 2020 compares to previous years over the last few decades. Then statisticians can dig deeper to try and attribute contributing factors. So there tends to be an increase in deaths of elderly people over winter. Presumably as we've got an aging population, that would factor into comparisons with say, 30yrs ago. Or there's a temperature correlation, ie a cold winter generally leads to more deaths. And as you say, we probably have more deaths this year due to COVID restrictions and NHS resource re-allocation.
Crime stats I guess would be interesting. I noticed less traffic on the roads during lockdown, so maybe that leads to fewer RTAs and deaths. Or maybe more deaths because people drive faster. And I guess some stats may show other effects, ie a fall in shoplifting because shops have been closed. Or if there's some migration to online thefts and frauds, so shoplifting from home.
But I also think there's been a lot of dubious attribution & stats. So there was a Florida man killed in a motorbike accident, yet became a COVID statistic. Or as winter approaches, suppose someone's had mild COVID that didn't require treatment, but then catches a cold & dies of pneumonia. That would seem a clearer co-morbidity, ie COVID weakened the person, the common cold killed them.
But for me, the biggest sin is probably the fixation on 'cases', especially in the media. Other than for public health epidemiologists tracking the spread, a 'case' isn't that serious, especially given the number of people who've been infected, but didn't notice or know until they got their test results. I'm also curious how the vaccination protocol will work. So 'diagnosis' is often via PCR, which can have high false positive/negative results. So will the PCR test detect 'cases' from people who've been vaccinated? If yes, how reliably can we determine it's effectiveness?
And that I guess also links into general effectiveness & 'public health' policies. So suppose I get vaccinated because I need my official COVID-Free travel & access pass. Yey! But if that only gives temporary (or no) immunity, I may become a blissfully clean asymptomatic spreader. And if I refuse vaccination, what services will I be denied? And what might I be required to carry, physically or virtually to show I'm 'unclean', like the lepers of old?
And then there's the safety angle. So governments around the world are gearing up for mass vaccinations. Jab for Victory! So on the one hand, this could be little different to other routine vaccinations like MMR, or flu shots. On the other, it's a novel mRNA vaccine that's been rushed into production with the vaccine makers being shielded and given immunity from liability. And if the vaccine's immunity is temporary, it looks to be hugely profitable & mostly risk-free. Stats on that should become more apparent after more people get their 2nd shot, which is when most of the adverse reactions seem to show up.
Being white isn't enough to stop US cops shooting you. If you got that from the BLM protests you've been sorely mislead. Go check out all the different coloured faces here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
Being female is a pretty decent method of staying alive however.
Something like that, however it depends what you mean by twice as likely. If you pick an American individual at random and all you know about them is they're black then you know they're about twice as likely to become a police death statistic.
But if you want a hypothetical like 'if Rebekah Jones was black' you arguably already have the conditional that she's someone who's come into contact with angry armed police, and an increased likelihood of interacting with angry armed police is a significant component of what increases the fatality rate in the black population. The at-the-scene racism being the other big component.
(Of course if you drill down into the scenario far enough: white female former state employee data scientist being arrested in Florida for hacking charges vs black female former state employee data scientist being arrested in Florida for hacking charges, then there won't be any fatality statistics).
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The cops don't know who'll they'll find. And they are just executing a standard search warrant like so many others. So it seems nothing wrong on the police's part. No weapons fired, everyone chill.
The issue seems to be the politics and that the department of health went after a warrant and then had it executed in the way it was.
And all the other crap in the land of the 'free'
No. It's entirely wrong on the police's part. This kind of crap happens all the time in Chicago. In fact, one reporter has done so many reports on these cases that it almost seems he's able to do nothing /but/ that. The hell of it is that so many of these raids are taking place at the wrong addresses.
The issue is the idea that the police executing a warrant for computers need to have guns drawn, this isn't a warrant for someone that has displayed any violent tendencies.
American police need to be taught de-escalation methods as at the moment their behavior increases the likelihood of a violent response.
There are 2 independent issues here:
1. DoH took an insanely heavy-handed approach to deal with this alleged infringement. Doubtless to make an example of her, to deter others from doing foolish things like refusing the massage the figures and instead reporting real numbers.
2. The cops, as ever, went for instant escalation an maximum aggression. Against a middle-aged family and their kids. Over an non-violent alleged crime. I suspect they get such a kick off the adrenaline rush that this is the default behaviour. Seems like shear luck no one got shot.
Please don't ignore the second by focussing solely on the first.
Many years ago (possibly before I actually went to the USA permanently so mid 70s) my then g/f worked in an area in Norfolk, VA well known for problems at night. (She was working in a bar opposite a 'massage parlour').
She told me that one of the local cops had turned down a promotion because he would have had to drive a desk and he 'enjoyed kicking ass'.
No change there, then.
"1. DoH took an insanely heavy-handed approach to deal with this alleged infringement. "
This! From what I've seen, heard and read so far, the only "crime" she's accused of is unauthorised use of some sort of "emergency" messaging system which seems to be something akin to a mailing list for "important" messages to State staff and officials rather than something like an emergency broadcast system used in times of life threatening crisis.
From what I have seen she was arrested for accessing an emergency messaging system that has multiple users across a number of departments but only 1 user / password combination for everyone. Their security was non-existent - Rebekah Jones was fired in May and the breach was supposed to be on 10th November. Did no-one think to change the password?
Anyone can access the system with no traceability of who did it
They apparently traced her IP address back but I wonder how much of that was a 'political' track back?
Sorry, but this isn't hacking. Misuse of a government communications system, at least in the eyes of the state, but they failed to correctly handle access and failed to revoke her access.
If my employer fails to revoke my building access and I walk back into the building, that's trespassing, not breaking and entering.
An they know what she did and where she did it from, so what legitimate evidence were they hoping to scrape from her devices that was actually related to the issue the warrant was ostensibly for?
I hope when she goes to trial the judge throws out everything from the search that is out of scope and then kicks this down to civil court. Sadly, the point of the exercise was to steal private communications from her to go after whistleblowers still inside the agencies dealing with Florida's Covid response. I doubt that her legal representation has enough pull to get those devices back, or purge or at least restrict access to the images taken of them.
I don't know what legitimate evidence they think they may find but she says the computer holds details of leaks and her sources still working in government. It will be interesting if there is a subtle purge of some people who have helped over the last 6 months.
Is it possible that she's actually in the wrong here? So many comments assume she's telling the truth about the hiding of data - but is that the case? Also, if she did send the message, that's pretty clearly accessing a system she knew she shouldn't access - fired in May, message sent in November, message text matches the kind of thing she's been saying, IP address is hers...
Could it be a setup? Sure. Could it have really been her? Sure. Could even have been a "wonder if my password still works" kind of stunt.
As for pointing guns at kids? First, the video doesn't seem to show that at all. (No kids present in video, unless I was looking at the wrong one. Just her answering the door, then officers entering.) Second, this is Florida. Lots of folks with crazy amounts of firearms. I'd **expect** police entering and searching a home to have weapons drawn, as they've been shot at in similar situations. Third, how old are the kids? A 4-year-old is likely not going to be threat - but a teenager hearing their mom being arrested might well be. Fourth, she told them her husband was also home, and they ordered everyone downstairs... at which point the video ended. The rest of it would be more revealing about the officers' conduct than what was released.
In order:
1. It's possible, but a crime that effectively consists of "typed a message into a system with a single every-user username and password" is a very small crime. It wasn't an abusive message. It wasn't a harmful message. It wasn't a repeated message. Assuming she did send the message, she neither broke through a complex security system nor did something very harmful with the access. The response is not proportionate.
2. The people in the house were not suspected of any violent crimes, nor have I seen any evidence of any reason to expect violence from them. I cannot use the same logic as a private citizen; "I just wanted to retrieve the toolbox I lent to my neighbors but I did so with a big gun in case they were armed too" isn't generally considered a good excuse in court. The police have provided exactly zero good reasons for why they had to get the guns out and point them; if they're that worried, they could just carry them in a safer way. Intentionally pointing them, at anybody, is clearly an act of intimidation.
3-4. Your argument on that point effectively boils down to "I don't know the facts, so let me invent some hypotheticals to justify the actions". Yes, an older child is more likely to respond violently to the police than a younger one. Also, a child with a box of sharp knives is more likely to be dangerous than one without. You can't use that kind of what if to justify the threat of violence unless the person actually demonstrates a likelihood to get violent. Just because there could have been an older child is a pointless argument, because there could have been all sorts of things that there wasn't.
It's possible that she is "in the wrong," but that's a question of where your moral and ethical compasses point. Many people believe she did the right thing by publishing information about the woeful state of Florida's pandemic response. Many people think the cops drawing their guns on her and her family was unnecessary and put everyone at unnecessary risk of being shot to death for no good reason. You personally may disagree.
I think what a lot of the Europeans in this comment thread are reacting to is summarized in your statement "I'd **expect** police entering and searching a home to have weapons drawn." Lots of people find that notion shocking.
Here in the US, a lot of people have guns, and even more so in Florida. Going into a house with weapons drawn is likely standard procedure. I understand gun ownership is likely not the norm in Europe, but it is here in the US. As for pointing their guns at her and her family, I didn't see in the video where they necessarily did; the officer on the other side of the door drew his AFTER she came out, and no other family members were shown on the video.
I'm curious to know if the information she posted about their pandemic response is accurate.
You're also going into the home after 20 minutes of discussions to gain access. One, the cops would be a little irritated by the wait. Two, 20 minutes is of course more than enough time for members of the family to arm themselves or barricade themselves in a part of the house to make some kind of stand.
The cops were probably right to have guns drawn at that point. They have a right to their own safety too.
It might not be obvious, but one way to minimize casualties is to go in with overwhelming force. If one cop shows up with a warrant, the chance of some foolish person trying for a Darwin award are a whole lot higher than if twenty show up with drawn weapons.
I saw six or so cops show up to a domestic violence call--it's pretty impressive. No one got hurt. I saw one cop show up to a domestic violence call. Four injured. Yeah, I'm talking about drawing a line with two data points, but America really isn't so violent that the average citizen is likely to personally witness that many situations.
The question of course is "how much force is appropriate in this particular situation"? Warrant-serving is a dangerous process.
Police are people too. Most want to get through their day safely. Some go in for the kicks, or get addicted to them. Personally, I would like to raise their salaries enough to increase the applicant pool substantially--and then get WAY more picky about who gets hired. Improving the attitude of the citizenry towards the police function itself would be a much cheaper way to get the same effect.
I saw a short documentary about the "police" forces for some of the smaller reservations in Alaska. Every last one of them had at least one criminal conviction for violence. But the towns could not afford to offer a salary sufficient to attract more desirable officers.
Against someone who is clearly thinking about a violent response but still values their own life, maybe. Against anyone else, dead wrong (often literally). If you put six people with weapons in front of someone, you have six times as many chances that they'll misinterpret something peaceful as potentially dangerous. They're already holding the weapons, so the usual response is lethal. Also, going into a situation where you're in a large group of armed people increases stress, which has proven in various experiments to reduce the ability to recognize small details and act in a calm and peaceful manner. This means it's even more likely that something gets interpreted as dangerous when it's not.
Bringing a lot of force can be of use when your goal is to make someone put down their weapon and come quietly, because you've destroyed any notion they might have had that they can shoot everyone in the way and get away. In a situation where you need to show up and take some computers, you don't need to do that. All you accomplish by doing it anyway is to make the people in the home more stressed because there are many armed people nearby and the officers more stressed for the reasons in my first paragraph. That can only make things worse, even though we may know incidents where it managed not to end tragically.
I would like to see those studies. For those of us who are familiar with fire arms, I cannot imagine how being armed would be more stressful than less. Or how having buddies similarly armed beside me increases stress. If there is no one in charge, then that can be a problem. But on such a warrant/raid there is ALWAYS someone in charge. And a designated second, at least.
I certainly agree that going in with guns out to serve a search warrant for a computer sounds excessive. But that is NOT what happened, and it is NOT what I was talking about. I was attempting to address the other side of the issue regarding the use of excess force to serve a warrant generally.
Why is that a problem? In fact, isn't that an asset of computing? The person who works as a statistician needs to know how to do statistical analysis and how to make the computer do the heavy computation bit. Their most important skills are knowing how to process data in a useful way, how to modify the processing to get useful views of data without corrupting the analysis, how to get data that represents reality, all that stuff. Why should they also know how the computer is going to go about calculating something once they've told it to? If they want to, they should learn. It might help them, so a lot of statisticians I know are good at programming, though they're mostly programmer-statisticians, so that's not a good sample. Still, if you don't need to know that in order to do what you're doing, it seems strange to assign some demerit to not knowing it anyway.
Do you say the same thing about other computer users? Should the people who know how to make GIMP edit a picture in complex ways also know the different utilities their GPU contributes to the task? Should the person who writes a book in a word processor know how the kernel relays input from a keyboard and how the word processor's text system interprets their keystrokes into characters and commands? In the same way, since I'm assuming you mostly work on computers, should you have to know the way all your equipment was manufactured, down to the logic gates on your processor? If you work in that, should you know how the rare earth elements that are used in it were mined and processed before they got to the factory? With all of the above, there's no reason that someone should be prevented from knowing that if they want, but also no good reason someone should be required to know it when they never deal with it.
A former criminal lawyer involved in the FL judicial system resigned in protest at this search, in part because of how outrageous it was.
The judge who signed the search warrant only graduated from law school in 2014 - even in FL, not enough time to be worthy of a seat on the bench. He was appointed in the last *two months* by Gov DeSantis, who hates this woman for standing up for the truth. Though she has had some personal issues in the past, what she has done recently has been very helpful for many in Florida.
Don't know if El Reg allows this, but her gofundme is at https://www.gofundme.com/f/DefendScience
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