Experts: Evidence to support search warrant on Rebekah Jones' home flimsy

Experts: Evidence to support search warrant on Rebekah Jones' home flimsy
floridatoday.com

Nope, that isn't what happened at all. The facts [1] show that she got the wrong end of the stick when the state epidemiologist asked to temporary remove one data field in order to validate the data (according to the emails seen). She didn't have all the facts, and she then incorrectly assumed that the data was being censored.

[1] https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/19/florida-heal...

Their expert isn't: "Butler, at the University of Florida, said making an IP address that appears to come from elsewhere isn't that complicated."

And the legal analysis is weak, but that's apparent from the title: "Experts: evidence to support search warrant on Rebekah Jones' home flimsy"

Yes, search warrants are to search for evidence. If the evidence wasn't flimsy they'd have had an arrest warrant.

It offers as a defense that there were no damages.

"What (Jones) did, didn't cause any damage," she continued. "Normally you don't see prosecutors prosecuting for computer crimes something that didn't cause any harm... it seems to be a very sketchy use of discretion to try to use this very serious statute against somebody who didn't cause any harm to your systems."

But it neglects to recognize that the damaging act is the message, and whatever actions or defamation it may cause, not the stolen CPU time.

It quotes the EFF to say that an IP alone isn't good evidence, "It's a thin read to just use the IP address, and it's one that we really, really discourage," said Cindy Cohn, the EFF's executive director. But it misses that they had an IP and it coincided with a small set of people who had access and motive.

They note that the police had an IP, but no linkage of IP/customer/date. This does allow challenging the warrant, but doesn't make it instantly null and void.

It says "Cybersecurity and digital rights experts also said the fact that the emergency system in question relied on a shared user name and password further complicates the case."

No, it doesn't. Fired people are not authorized users. And they have an IP address which points to a specific one of those users, so that's not complicated.

It then attempts to conflate misuse of data with unauthorized access of the system at all by claiming that this case is similar to Van Buren v. United States which is about a police officer using his authorized access to do something which was forbidden.

I have no opinion about the case but this article is trying to give me one. Not facts, it just wants to skip straight to opinions.