Fallout continues from Florida’s gunpoint raid on COVID data scientist Rebekah Jones’ home

Fallout continued Wednesday from the gunpoint raid of Florida data scientist Rebekah Jones by state law enforcement, with a top Republican judiciary official resigning and researchers across the U.S. concerned about a potential chilling effect on their own work.

Jones had been fired from her post as the COVID dashboard architect and maintainer last May, ostensibly for insubordination, the state said. However, she claimed that it was because Florida’s government had wanted her to alter COVID data to downplay the pandemic’s severity as Gov. Ron DeSantis was trying to reopen parts of the state’s economy.

Rebekah Jones in her office at the Florida Department of Health.

After leaving, she continued to post data on her own dashboard. In the middle of last month, authorities allege, someone hacked into the state’s emergency communications channel to send a message urging people to “speak up before another 17,000 people are dead.”

On Monday morning around 8:30, armed Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents burst in after, they said, Jones didn’t answer her phone or the door for 20 minutes. Guns drawn, they ordered Jones and her family outside and took the computer equipment that she was using to create the dashboard, she said later.

Florida authorities raid home of former state health official fired in May who claimed she was told to censor COVID data

That evening, appearing on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” Jones told anchor Chris Cuomo that she had not been near a state communications system in six months and was “not tech savvy” enough to hack into it. She also alleged that the state government was not after her directly, that they were looking for other people who took issue with DeSantis’ handling of the pandemic.

She also called it “a thinly veiled attempt to intimidate scientists” and said that state department of health staffers were being let go “left and right.”

Indeed, such a seizure did give researchers and academics across the country pause, Florida Today reported Wednesday.

SEE IT: Bodycam video shows gunpoint raid on Florida COVID data scientist Rebekah Jones’ home

“It’s a scary time,” Jay Metzger, president of the New England chapter of URISA, a national association of geographic information system professionals, who plot data geographically, told Florida Today. “When you’re simply doing your job, and you could get thrown in jail because people don’t like how you’re doing a job, it’s scary.”

Metzger also manages GIS for the Rhode Island Department of Health and set up that state’s coronavirus data portal, but clarified to Florida Today that he was speaking only on behalf of his role at NEURISA.

The umbrella organization of geographical professionals also reacted.

“After @GeoRebekah was fired last May, we wrote to @GovRonDesantis reminding him of the critical role geographers play in this pandemic,” the American Association of Geographers wrote in a statement on Twitter after the raid. “Today’s brazen actions by FL authorities demand greater transparency to protect the free flow of information and rights of the public.”

The raid also ignited outrage among politicians, public figures and celebrities alike, reported the Tallahassee Democrat, all of them crying foul.

Authorities alleged, meanwhile, that the internal communications hack came from Jones’ IP address.

But at least one Republican took issue with that assertion and was concerned enough to back off from serving the DeSantis government. On Tuesday, lifelong Republican Ron Filipkowski resigned his post on the 12th Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission, a panel that selects judges, after reviewing the search warrant, the Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday. The 52-year-old attorney had served in the role for 10 years.

“The recent events regarding public access to truthful data on the pandemic, and the specific treatment of Rebekah Jones has made the issue a legal one rather than just medical,” he wrote in a letter to the governor’s general counsel, noting the reason he hadn’t resigned earlier. “I no longer wish to serve the current government of Florida in any capacity.”

In his letter he called the raid “unconscionable,” and said that even if Jones had done what she is accused of, the raid was overkill.

“You don’t send 12 armed officers to raid her computer for doing that,” Filipkowski, who has opposed many Republican policies under the Trump administration, told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. “That’s Gestapo. That’s authoritarian dictator tactics. That’s not America. It really viscerally bothered me.”