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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

Why? We have no evidence of this being either lawful or unlawful.

I guess people just want to downvote my question without an answer.

Why? Because regardless of the legalities here she is doing good work in a state that is committed to hiding the truth from residents.

Nobody was hiding anything as far as I can see. The state epidemiologist asked her department to temporarily remove one data field from the public report while they verified some data. Then, they asked it to be re-enabled a few hours later.

From what I can tell, Rebekah's supervisor didn't mention the reason for removing the data, he just told her to remove it. She told him it was "the wrong call", but did it anyway. He then told her to add the data back a few hours later, which she did.

So, it looks like she got the wrong end of the stick about deleting data, and was then fired for insubordination. Apparently she has also has a criminal history including battery against a police officer and sexual cyberstalking of her ex-boyfriend.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/19/florida-heal...

https://www.lsureveille.com/daily/crime-briefs-student-charg...

https://tallahasseereports.com/2020/05/20/rebekah-jones-firi...

If you want to dispute the facts go ahead, but don't bother with this character assassination BS.

Brian Burgess is a political operative, not a journalist.

The State of Florida has all of her email correspondence at work and after firing her for insubordination the best evidence they can offer from a person they allege is such a terrible human being is that she sent an email that said "that's a wrong call" and then complying with the request.

As far as I can tell Jones' work since her firing has been fine and that the Governor felt the need to use his platform smear her just bolsters her credibility, as does this absurd police action at her house.

Looks like you did more research than the original article.

Just a few mins of googling to try to dig up the facts.

> Apparently she has also has a criminal history including battery against a police officer and sexual cyberstalking of her ex-boyfriend.

Please do not post off-topic and irrelevant information onto existing threads, you run the risk of derailing the current conversation.

Her criminal history has nothing to do with whether or not this specific warrant, raid, and overall government response was justified.

"battery against a police officer" obviously relates to the level of danger that a police officer would be expecting. If that happened before, it is more likely to happen again.

Two problems:

A) That is an extremely dangerous road to encourage law enforcement to go down. "Charged with" is not the same as a conviction, and resisting arrest is a broad category that can encompass a wide variety of behaviors. Police in most instances should judge danger based on the current information they have, based on who is actively presenting a threat -- not based on whether or not someone was charged with something in the past. I can go into more detail on that if you want, but... I don't really think it should be hard to figure out why that would be problematic.

B) Even ignoring the above point, your comment is exactly the kind of off-topic change I was warning about. This thread was started by someone claiming that Rebekah's whistleblowing was justified and that it was worth throwing financial aid her way because she was doing the right thing. It was followed by another commenter questioning why she deserved aid, and as evidence that she didn't, that commenter devolved into a personal attack over her previous criminal record. Now we're debating whether the police used excessive force and whether they should have been scared of her.

The thread is off topic. The point is, the police shouldn't have done a raid over a crime this minor in the first place. Rebekah's previous criminal record doesn't have anything to do with the severity of the crime that caused this raid. The conversation over how police should have acted during the raid is a distraction from the original point that this was not the kind of crime that warranted breaking down someone's door and pointing a gun at their family.

"battery against a police officer" in a completely separate case does not change that point. It's irrelevant information to what we're currently talking about.

>another commenter questioning why she deserved aid

No, that is incorrect. OP claimed she was a whistleblower, with no evidence. I outlined the facts that we have available, which seem to show she wasn't.

>that commenter devolved into a personal attack over her previous criminal record.

Giving details of someone's previous publicly available criminal record isn't a "personal attack".

What do those prior charges against her have to do with whether or not she's a whistleblower in this specific case? Nothing.

> Giving details of someone's previous publicly available criminal record isn't a "personal attack".

It is when it's irrelevant information tacked on just just to give an impression that her account of what happened here is untrustworthy. If you had left that sentence off and not mentioned her prior charges, would anything about the rest of your comment have needed to change? What were you trying to accomplish by bringing up unrelated prior charges other than to impugn her character?

> I outlined the facts that we have available, which seem to show she wasn't.

Eh... let's not go overboard here. You linked 2 relevant articles, one of which is largely sympathetic to Jones' account, and one of which is an opinion piece that devolves into the same personal attacks in your own comment.

Then to drive home the point of how important you thought her prior charges were, you linked a 3rd article that's only talking about those charges and nothing else.

The default is lawful until proven otherwise.

And that goes for the police who executed the search warrant - lawful until proven otherwise. The warrant is issued by a judge meeting a probable cause standard.

And pointing a gun at her children is just dandy, isn’t it? Cops training and behavior is one huge problem in the US. The other part of the problem is people like you, people who justify and normalize their violent behavior. If i were to choose what’s worse I’d say it is actually not the cops who are trained poorly, it’s people like you whose thinking is distorted towards violence

They were clearing a corner (assuming the kids were off-frame since the video didn't show it). I see no problem with what was presented in the article/video. Training and behavior is a major problem, but I don't see it in this case. If you had any training, then you would have understood there was no abuse in what was presented.

I have some training. When I was taught to clear corners it was always done by the first person to go around the corner. There isn't much point in clearing a corner when you have someone friendly who has already gone around it.

The LEO who is clearing the corner has also gone to a higher escalation of force than the other LEOs. Other LEOs have weapons drawn but he's the only one pointing his gun at things. The fact that only one person is behaving differently, and more aggressively, suggests to me that their behavior isn't appropriate here.

The first person went past the stairs (you clear floor by floor). It would be better to park the first person at the stairs while the others proceed to search the rest of the first floor, basically a modified bounding overwatch. That way you don't have to reclear the stairs everytime you pass it (since the upstairs has not been cleared).

You have to clear a corner of your conscience and learn some empathy (fake it till you make it). If it ever happened to you and your family you’d be pissed and wouldn’t waste your energy in trying to justify their violent behavior

Lol I have been the victim of police misconduct and filed a (successful) complaint against them. Maybe if you took some training and educated yourself on law and law enforcement, you would have some empathy for both sides instead of just one. There was no violence here.

Soft violence or symbolic violence is what I was referring to here. It’s menant to humiliate, to subjugate, to impose unearned reapect and law enforcement abuse it all the friggin time. Just once in a while is there is a honest and really respectful cop that not cooperating with doesn’t even appear like an option. But when cops bark orders and you’re supposed to say yes sir, i’ll do whatever you please because you’re authority, that’s when we’re dealing with soft violence

Well, unless you disband government all together there will always be soft violence - every government imposes its will over the people.

If I pointed a gun at someone that would, at the very least, be assault with a deadly weapon. It's definitely violence.

But not if you’re law inforcement, it is considered routine or justified as a commenter did previously: they did clear some corner or whatever. This kind of behavior has sadly been normalized and is seen as acceptable now. If we don’t do something now we’ll have striking/hitting/punching suspects as normal too

That's not true at all and is a slippery slope argument. In fact, over the decades the courts have made numerous rulings in the opposite direction - giving suspects more rights and protections.

That is not untrue, the courts have made some terrible rulings but that’s a different story. However, the law enforcement department has become increasingly trigger happy and there’s no denying of that.

Brady v MD, Miranda, and others have strengthened people's rights. Are there still problems? Yes. But overall it is getting better.

What evidence do you have that cops are more trigger happy now than before? The numbers seem pretty steady to me. https://www.statista.com/statistics/251894/number-of-justifi...

They may indeed not be more trigger happy now than before but more evidence came to light now so the perception is that they are more trigger happy when in reality they WERE ALREADY trigger happy.

Im aware that there are professional law enforcement personnel but overall the institution failed to clean up its bad apples. Oh no, not only that but actively defends them.

I didn't say the warrant was not lawful.

But I have the right to give money to whoever I want until it is shown to be unlawful.

You have the right to give money to anyone whether their actions were lawful or not. I was just wondering why people jump to give money to people they never met, based on 30 seconds of video and a short article. Maybe there's more to it, like what was listed on the search warrant.

Her actions seem to have been ethical and important regardless of whether they were lawful.

I think the CEH exam would disagree with unauthorized access being ethical. What was her important action directly linked to this?

Reporting accurate data on the current pandemic when government officials couldn't be trusted to do so. On the balance of evidence I don't think it's that likely that she was responsible for the unauthorized access, and even if she did I don't think the ethics would be as cut and dried as you're making them out to be regardless of what CEH says. What if that message saved lives? What if, as a hypothetical/counterfactual, it had saved thousands of lives?

Ends justifying the means is generally not considered sound ethical thinking. She may feel it's her moral responsibility, but it still wouldn't be ethical.

That's an awfully flippant dismissal of an entire major branch of moral philosophy. Consequentialism has its critics and I don't expect everyone to subscribe to it in a strict sense, but if your own moral philosophy doesn't justify unauthorized access to a computer system to save lives (and s/thousands/billions/ if it's just a matter of degree) we'll just have to agree to disagree.

> Ends justifying the means is generally not considered sound ethical thinking.

Sure it is; what else could justify means?

It is often recognized that there is a tendency to make arguments about ends justifying means when the benefits realistically foreseeable from an action are not such that they should be seen as justifying the particular means, though.

It would be better if you call it by its name then - utilitarianism. The choice with the greatest good or least harm. This is different from the ends justifying the means, which is colloquially used to justify bad actions.

> It would be better if you call it by its name then - utilitarianism.

Non-utilitarian deontological systems typically have rules about which means are appropriate to which ends, so, no, ends properly justifying means isn’t exclusive to utilitarian systems.

> Non-utilitarian deontological systems typically have rules about which means are appropriate to which ends, so, no, ends properly justifying means isn’t exclusive to utilitarian systems.

In the example you mention, the means are justified by the rules, not the ends.

> In the example you mention, the means are justified by the rules, not the ends.

No, in a deontological system where the appropriate means are tied to the ends, the means are justified by the ends. The rules are the decision principals, but the ends are (in that case) the inputs.

> deontological system where the appropriate means are tied to the ends, the means are justified by the ends.

according to the rules.

> The rules are the decision principals, but the ends are (in that case) the inputs.

Whether an input provides justification is a function of whether the rules specify that it does or not.

Sure, justification in any system is a product of the the rules as applied to the facts.

But, just as in reasoning from facts with rules of logic and inference to conclusions of facts, you don't say knowledge of the fact conclusion is justified by the rules of logic and inference, but by the source facts, so when ethical rules consider means in determining ends, it is said that those ends are justified by the means. In either the fact or ethics case you will, when it is not otherwise clear from context, cite the particular rule framework within which you are working, but even then you wouldn't say the conclusion or action is justified by the rule framework, though you might say it is justified within the rule framework by the applicable premises.

You're arguing about the individual definitions of specific words while ignoring the overall question. Nobody here cares about the subtle differences you see between "ethics" and "morals."

Here's the question: if you have the opportunity to save hundreds or thousands of lives by breaking a minor law, are you justified in breaking that law? Many of us would say yes. The alternative is absurd, it doesn't hold up in the real world. How many widely accepted historical heroes do we have who broke laws to save lives?

tfehring's point still stands, and I think you should respond to their post using the meaning that they obviously intended before you get mired down in a more pedantic debate over the technical definition of individual words.

I think you're mistaken to think that more data will save people's lives. The people not wearing masks have turned it into a political ideology, which doesnt respond well to data base arguments.

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