Even if you believe retributive justice is to be doled out by LE, one of its own principles is: "It is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers."

And I'm not buying that guns-drawn arrest with kids present is necessary. Dead serious.

I didn't comment at all about that kids having a gun pointed at them. that is awful. The rest? Sounds like normal legal proceedings against somebody suspected of committing a computer crime.

When you're making policies for people who both fire guns and have guns fired upon them for a living, you don't get to be very fine-grained in those policies. The situations are, by their nature, chaotic.

In a situation where police are legitimately going in with guns drawn (like, I dunno, arresting actual terrorists known to have actual guns?), they don't have the luxury of determining whether someone's a child before pointing a gun in their face. If anyone in the house could be armed and firing back, they need to point the gun first.

So, there isn't a realistic "They shouldn't have pointed guns at children, but the rest of it is fine." Either it's okay to point guns at children because the situation demanded it, and the moral culpability of the child's trauma (or worse) is on whoever left children with armed outlaws... or they shouldn't have gone in with guns at all to the personal residence of someone whose alleged crime involved no violent action of any sort.

Actually, no. Retributive justice is not something LE usually gets involved in (within civilized democracies). It is left for the courts. The way she was arrested isn't normal, nor necessary. But I suspect that was the point.

She hasn't been charged with any crime. It's way too early to be accusing a whistleblower of being a criminal.

You've seen zero evidence of her being responsible and you still accuse her?

As far as I can tell from the story, there is no evidence whatsoever that she had anything to do with the unauthorized access, which seems to consist of somebody logging into an account that has a shared username and password (!) and posting a message that got emailed out to ~1700 people.

> As far as I can tell from the story, there is no evidence whatsoever that she had anything to do with the unauthorized access

They had to get a warrant to search her home. Seems unlikely that a judge would issue a warrant without some kind of probable cause. While the system was poorly secured, a lot of poorly secured systems have basic logging. All it would take is an IP address.

None of us are privy to the details here, so it's really hard to say.

> Seems unlikely that a judge would issue a warrant without some kind of probable cause.

Unfortunately, here in the US that is not something you can bank on. There is a large amount of evidence that judges routinely sign on warrants without even understanding what the warrant is for, and there are even many types of non-standard warrants that do not need to follow that protocol.

You're just assuming that's what the warrant was related to.

She hasn't been charged, let alone found guilty, of any crime.

I made it clear that it was conjecture on my part. Pulling the IP from server logs was the most likely reason they got the warrant. Turns out that was indeed the case.

> Somebody fired from a job over a grievance used unauthorized access and is surprised the FBI showed up at her door? I don't understand.

This was state police rather than federal (a highly relevant distinction, given the context) and the snide "surprised" is unwarranted/baseless when we don't have even the full facts from one side let alone both sides.

We don't actually know that she used unauthorized access. (Innocent until proven guilty? Apparently not here!)

That aside, even if she did, is that reason to storm in with guns? The level of possible harm is incredibly out of proportion with the supposed crime.

It wasn't the FBI, it was the FDLE. Also, the warrant was for something (more or less) completely unrelated.

I'm not sure she is surprised. But if her grievance is that her employer is not fulfilling its public health mission, and the data she is sharing is public health data she feels the public has a right to see, then she might feel getting arrested is unjust.

While the arrest may or may not be unjust, the fact of the matter is that she broke the law. Which typically results in police showing up. Regardless of your attitude about what she did, the title can be really boiled down to 'data scientist releases confidential federal data; gets arrested'.

How is it "the fact of the matter that she broke the law?"

She hasn't even been accused of breaking the law. There have been zero charges.

Can you explain to me why COVID-19 data should be considered confidential? My first thought is that she got raided because she was releasing data that contradicted the Official Florida State COVID-19 data.

The alleged crime is unauthorized access to a government communication system and has nothing to do with covid-19 data.

The evidence provided in the article for the crime is flimsy at best however. The communication system had a shared username and password for everyone and the warrant was reported to be based on an IP address that was believed to be the source of the unauthorized access.

It seems reasonable to go 50/50 on either of:

1. they looked for and found a reason to charge her with this as retribution for her work.

2. she was disgruntled enough about being let go that she illegally accessed a poorly secured government system to send a retaliatory communication.

There is no where near enough information to know which is which though.

They weren’t FBI, they were state police. And this was more than showing up at her door: they came in with guns drawn, pointed them at people. One cop had his finger on the trigger.

> Somebody fired from a job over a grievance used unauthorized access and is surprised the FBI showed up at her door?

From the article, I think it was the Florida state police, not the FBI.

Lets see if she actually used unauthorized access or they just picked someone who could have done it and was convenient to blame.

They aren't FBI. Where is the evidence she did it? Even if she did send the text, why do they need that many guns drawn (check out the rifle on the last guy in the vid)?

Yeah sounds particularly risky to break the CFAA.

Or indeed simply to be accused of doing so; sounds like a _lot_ of people had access to the shared credentials.

Please don’t do that here.