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Who is Rebekah Jones? Florida police raid home of COVID-19 data whistleblower for ‘hacking’ state email system

Jones was fired from her job at the Florida Department of Health in May and she has since used publicly-available DOH coronavirus data to create an alternate dashboard to track COVID-19 infections

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement raided the home of former Department of Health data analyst, Rebekah Jones, alleging that she has may have hacked into the health department's email system and sent unauthorized emails to employees. Following the raid, Jones took to Twitter to share a video captured at her home at the time of the raid, which shows the law enforcement officers enter her home with their guns drawn out. 

In the following tweet, she wrote aimed at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis , "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." Even though all of her collected data and information have been seized, Jones is determined that she'll continue to work. 

Who is Rebekah Jones and why was she fired?

Jones was fired from her job at the Florida Department of Health in May, for creating her own coronavirus dashboard reflecting the state's COVID-19 cases and exposing the manipulation of the date due to politics. Her dashboard allegedly offered a clear picture of Florida counties that were ready to re-open following the initial lockdown. However, her calculations showed that only two counties met the state's criteria for re-opening. 

"When I went to show them what the report card would say for each county, among other things, they asked me to delete the report card because it showed that no counties, pretty much, were ready for reopening. And they didn't want to draw attention to that," she explained. Jones alleged that a superior asked her to open the data and alter numbers to decrease the positivity rate from 18% to 10%. And, when she refused to do so, she was sacked for insubordination.

"To me, it did not read like some kind of political conspiracy or some higher directive. It seemed like people who expected when I brought in those results, the results to support the plan they had written, and they did not, they seemed panicked, and like they had to figure out a way to make the results match the plan," she claimed. A spokesperson for the Florida Governor said Jones "exhibited a repeated course of insubordination during her time with the department," leading to her termination. She reportedly filed a confidential whistleblower complaint with the Florida Commission on Human Relations. 

A review of Leon County court documents shows that Jones was charged in July 2019 with two counts of cyberstalking and one count of sexual cyber harassment. According to court records, one of the cases Jones is still open.

Jones calls the raid a "threat"

Jones who spoke to Herald/Times on December 7, called the raid a "threat". “It is one thing to point a gun six inches away from my face and threaten me. It is another to point it at my 2-year-old’s face," she expressed. 

The FDLE said that the search warrant for Jones's home in Tallahassee was issued after receiving a complaint about unauthorized access to the state department's messaging system which is a "part of an emergency alert system, to be used for emergencies only." The email was reportedly sent to 1,750 employee accounts before it came to light. According to the Nove 10 email obtained by Tampa Bay Times, the recipients were urged 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 data scientist as however denied her involvement in the hacking and said that she has never "displayed any capability of doing that."

State Rep. Anna Eskamani, also an Orlando Democrat, called Jones’ video “horrifying,” sharing the post on Twitter, too. “Why are guns being drawn out for a ‘data breach’?” Even actor George Takei encouraged his followers on Twitter to donate to Jones’s dashboard “to support her work and to give the finger to DeSantis and his gestapo.”