A State Scientist Questioned Florida's Virus Data. Now Her Home's Been Raided. - The Ne... - 0 views
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MIAMI — The complicated story of how a Florida data scientist responsible for managing the state’s coronavirus numbers wound up with state police agents brandishing guns in her house this week began seven long months ago, when the scientist, Rebekah D. Jones, was removed from her post at the Florida Department of Health.
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Two months in, Ms. Jones was sidelined and then fired for insubordination, a conflict that she said came to a head when she refused to manipulate data to show that rural counties were ready to reopen from coronavirus lockdowns.
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Mr. DeSantis cast Ms. Jones as a disgruntled ex-employee who is not an epidemiologist and whose claims about a lack of data transparency were unfounded.
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The story took a surprising new turn on Monday morning, when agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement appeared at the door of Ms. Jones’s townhome.Image
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Ms. Jones has spent months publicly urging health department employees to denounce what she says has been the manipulation and obfuscation of virus data to make Florida look better off than it really is.
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By June, she had built her own dashboard to rival the state’s, funded in part by donations from hundreds of thousands of newfound followers on social media.
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She denied having anything to do with the messages. Florida had reported 17,460 coronavirus deaths at the time, and she said she would never have rounded that number down.
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“That’s textbook bad security practice, and this is an example of why — it’s cumbersome to revoke access and hard to attribute actions to the responsible people,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Michigan.
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Early on, state agencies refused to release information about the number of coronavirus hospitalizations and cases in long-term care facilities, and only provided it after news organizations threatened litigation.