Rebekah Jones, the founder of Florida’s coronavirus database, who clashed publicly with Governor Ron DeSantis in a dispute over data manipulation, said she would surrender on Sunday after an arrest warrant was issued.
The state law enforcement department said it would not reveal details of the charges against the 31-year-old data analyst until she was in custody. The agency has been investigating allegations that Jones illegally accessed a state messaging system and staged an armed attack at his home in Tallahassee last month.
Jones, who was dismissed by the Florida Department of Health in May for insubordination after alleging she was ordered to censor and manipulate information in the database she founded and managed, said she was informed that the charge was unrelated to the investigation and accused DeSantis of retaliation.
“The governor is not going to win the war against science and free speech,” she said in tweets this also confirmed his intention to surrender to the police on Sunday night. “He will not silence those who speak.”
The episode prolongs a heated dispute that began last year, when Jones said she was instructed to change the data to support the Republican Governor’s plan to reopen the state’s economy, despite growing Covid-19 cases.
Jones was fired by health officials and DeSantis was quick in his own retribution, subjecting Jones to a public assassination of character and dismissing her as an insubordinate and disgruntled former employee.
Since her resignation, she has continued to gather and disseminate information online about the state’s Covid-19, maintaining a rival to the official database and, more recently, compiling and publishing case information in Florida schools.
Jones’s arrest in December came after an allegation by the Florida Department of Health that an unknown person or persons broke into a state system to send emergency communications and send an unauthorized message to members of a team responsible for coordinating public health and medical response.
The message urged recipients to “speak before another 17,000 people die. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak before it’s too late ”.
On Saturday, Jones said that a police search for computer equipment seized during the operation at his home in December “found no evidence of a message”.
She admitted that “the police found documents I received / downloaded from sources in the state, or something of that nature”, but insisted that the “crime” was not related to the original warrant.
In it most recent tweet, posted at lunchtime on Sunday, Jones said she was “censored by the state of Florida until further notice.”
Jones posted a video of the December 7 operation and said the police aimed guns at their children. Since then, her family has moved from Florida for safety, she said. A Florida judge is brooding over her request to return seized computer equipment.
On Sunday, Florida reported 11,093 new cases of coronavirus for a total of 1,571,279 and 135 deaths, bringing that number to 24,515.