Not addressing claims of her data accuracy she <strike>did break</strike> apparently broke CFAA:
> "FDLE began an investigation November 10, 2020, after receiving a complaint from the Department of Health (DOH) regarding unauthorized access to a Department of Health messaging system which is part of an emergency alert system, to be used for emergencies only," Plessinger said.
> All authorized users use the same user name and password.
Having shared credentials for an account is going to make it very difficult to prove who accessed the system.
Also, the single user for a common system typically means that they didn't want to pay extra to have multiple users. Makes me wonder if this incident will open Florida to a lawsuit by the vendor.
Somewhat on tangent but interesting fact I just read about the CFAA - two cofounders of HN (Morris and Swartz) were convicted of breaking CFAA - Morris being the first ever.
Assuming Morris and Swartz here are Robert Morris and Aaron Swartz - Morris is a cofounder of YC, but I don't believe he had much to do with HN. Swartz was involved with Reddit, not HN.
He was a co-developer on the Lisp variant that HN is written in, but as far as I know the HN codebase was PG doing a POC that said Lisp variant could write software (and given he was more concerned with Lisp then and Reddit, then a company YC had investments in, had just rewritten from Lisp to Python, maybe making the case that Lisp could be used)
Sure. But if it turns out her allegations are correct, and the state was manipulating the data, I think that more than excuses it, and makes the police action malicious (criminal?) retaliation. If the state wasn't manipulating any data, then it's disorderly and improper (though doesn't call for armed officers still...).
Like most things, you have to sort out the details of the case before you can pronounce judgement.
Call me biased, but for some reason, when people sacrifice their careers and freedoms to send out a warning about corruption, I usually give them a lot more trust than the institution under scrutiny. Time will tell.
> "FDLE began an investigation November 10, 2020, after receiving a complaint from the Department of Health (DOH) regarding unauthorized access to a Department of Health messaging system which is part of an emergency alert system, to be used for emergencies only," Plessinger said.