TALLAHASSEE — The home of the former Florida Department of Health data scientist who has been running an alternative website to the state’s coronavirus dashboard was raided Monday morning by state police, according to a post she put on Twitter late in the day.
“There will be no update today. At 8:30 am this morning, state police came into my house and took all my hardware and tech. They were serving a warrant on my computer after DOH filed a complaint. They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids,’' wrote Rebekah Jones at 5 p.m.
Jones was fired from her job in May as the geographic information system manager for the health department’s Division of Disease Control and Health Protection after she complained in an email to users of a state data portal that the state was manipulating data. She announced that she had been removed from overseeing the dashboard and hinted that she had been stripped of the responsibility as a result of raising concerns about the state’s commitment to transparency.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said in a statement late Monday that they issued the search warrant after suspecting Jones of being responsible for a computer hack into the health department website and the sending of an unauthorized message to members of the State Emergency Response Team responsible for coordinating public health and medical response.
The 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.”
“This morning FDLE served a search warrant at a residence on Centerville Court in Tallahassee, the residence of Rebekah Jones,’' the state statement said. “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. Agents believe someone at the residence on Centerville Court illegally accessed the system.”
FDLE said that when agents arrived, “they knocked on the door and called Ms. Jones in an attempt to minimize disruption to the family. 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.”
According to the video Jones posted on Twitter, police pointed guns at her and ordered her husband to appear. “Come outside the house,’' they commanded, asking who else was in the house. She replied it was her two children and husband.
“Come down the stairs, now,’' police shouted. “POLICE, come down now.”
Jones screeched: “They just pointed a gun at my children” and that is where the video ended.
Jones had attracted national attention for her work creating the dashboard, which had been singled out for praise last spring by Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force. After she was removed for what the governor’s office called “insubordination,’' Jones created a competing dashboard, one that draws upon state data but offers an expanded menu of metrics, including data the state was not making public at the time — such as hospital bed availability by facility, a key number, especially now as the number of confirmed cases soars.
She also remained defiant, developing a nationwide dashboard to report coronavirus cases by school, data which Florida officials collect but refused to make publicly available for months. Jones wrote in an op-ed in the Miami Herald in July saying that other state workers were being silenced for expressing their concerns about the state’s handling of the coronavirus and its data collection.
On Twitter Monday, she accused Gov. Ron DeSantis of orchestrating the raid.
“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,’' she said. “They took evidence of corruption at the state level. They claimed it was about a security breach. This was DeSantis. He sent the gestapo.”
FDLE said the investigation is active.
Jones could not immediately be reached.
This is a developing story. Stick with tampabay.com for updates.
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