Agents raid home of fired Florida data scientist who built COVID-19 dashboard "FDLE began an investigation November 10, 2020, after receiving a complaint from the
Department of Health regarding unauthorized access to a Department of Health messaging system which is part of an emergency alert system, to be used for emergencies only," Plessinger said.
Plessinger said when agents arrived, they knocked and
waited 20 minutes for Jones to answer the door.
"Ms. Jones refused to come to the door for 20 minutes and hung-up on agents. After several attempts and verbal notifications that law enforcement officers were there to serve a legal search warrant, Ms. Jones eventually came to the door and allowed agents to enter," Plessinger said. "Ms. Jones' family was upstairs when agents made entry into the home."
Former Florida Health Department scientist Rebekah Jones.
The investigation is active, she added.
"As in all cases, our role is to determine the facts of what happened and a State Attorney determines whether or not charges are filed."
She tweeted: "They took my phone and the computer I use every day to post the case numbers in Florida, and school cases for the entire country.
They took evidence of corruption at the state level. They claimed it was about a security breach. This was DeSantis. He sent the gestapo."
he DOH said recently that someone hacked the emergency communications channel.
Jones told a reporter that she is not a hacker. "I don't know how to do that stuff."
A Nov. 10 message, obtained by the Tampa Bay Times, urged recipients to “
speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late.”
The email read to the effect of “
if you don't speak up now before thousands more are dead, then you know, this is on you. And this was sent to thousands of SOH employees from the DOH emergency response account (ESF-8)."
According to DOH sources who had been talking to Jones,
an email had gone out across the department from the ESF-8 email account around the time that five of eight team leaders had been fired.
Jones told a USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida reporter that a series of firings and resignations in DOH, including recently departed public information officer Alberto Moscoso’s departure, were “a purge.”
“It's like a massacre. And those aren't the only people that have been fired or left,” she said.
Jones also said she has backups of the data and files that power her websites that were stored on the seized hardware.
"
This is what happens to scientists who do their job honestly," Jones tweeted. "This is what happens to people who speak truth to power."
nypost.com
