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Rebekah Jones, the founder of the Florida Coronavirus Database who has clashed publicly with Gov. Ron DeSantis in a data manipulation dispute, said she would surrender on Sunday after an arrest warrant has been issued.
The State Department of Law Enforcement said it would not release details of the allegations against the 31-year-old data analyst until she is in custody. The agency was investigating allegations that Jones illegally accessed a state messaging system and staged an armed raid on his Tallahassee home last month.
Jones, who was fired by the Florida Department of Health in May for insubordination after she claimed she was ordered to censor and manipulate information in the database she founded and managed, said he was told the charge was unrelated to this investigation and charged DeSantis with retaliation. .
“The governor will not win his war on science and free speech,” she said in tweets it also confirmed his intention to surrender to the police on Sunday night. “He will not silence those who speak.”
The episode continues a bitter conflict that began last year when Jones claimed he was told to change the data to support the Republican governor’s plan to reopen the state’s economy despite soaring cases of Covid-19.
Jones was fired by health officials and DeSantis was quick with his own retribution, subjecting Jones to a public assassination and dismissing her as an insubordinate and disgruntled former employee.
Since her dismissal, she has continued to amass and disseminate information about the Covid-19 status online, now a rival of the official database and more recently compiling and posting information on cases in schools in Florida.
Jones’ arrest in December followed an allegation by the Florida Department of Health that one or more unknown people hacked into a state system used to send emergency communications and send a unauthorized message to members of a team responsible for coordinating public health and medical response.
The message urged recipients to “speak up before 17,000 more are dead.” You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be part of it. Be a hero. Speak up before it’s too late ”.
On Saturday Jones said that a law enforcement search of computer equipment seized in the raid on his home in December “found no evidence of a message“.
She admitted that “the police had found documents that I had received / downloaded from sources in the state, or something like that”, but insisted that the “crime” was not related to the initial mandate.
In her most recent tweet, posted Sunday at noon, Jones said she had been “censored by the state of Florida until further notice.”
Jones posted a video of the December 7 raid and said police pointed guns at her children. Her family has since left Florida for safety reasons, she said. A Florida judge is considering his request for the return of the seized computer equipment.
Florida reported 11,093 new coronavirus cases for a total of 1,571,279 and 135 deaths on Sunday, bringing that number to 24,515.
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