Jacob Moscovitch is the photographer for the photo.
The Governor of Missouri doesn't know how websites work. He held a press conference in St. Louis to reiterate his desire to prosecute a journalist.
In October of 2021, reporter Josh Renaud reported that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website source code had exposed the social security numbers of over 100,000 school teachers, administrators, and counselors. He published the story after he reported the problem to the state.
The alert was not well received by the DESE and they immediately accused Renaud of hacking the website. An individual took the records of at least three educators, unencrypted the source code from the webpage, and viewed the social security number of those specific educators, according to a letter from the Missouri Education Commissioner.
According to records obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the FBI told the state that the website had been messed up and that it was not an actual network intrusion.
The source code was not unreadable. The source code of a website is usually available to anyone who uses a web browser. It's as easy to look at it as it is to open theDeveloper Tools option in nearly every web browser. You can look at The Verge's source code right now. Anyone who uses the Developer Tools on a website they don't own is a hacker.
I just hacked Facebook.
Governor Parson's behavior since the paper first published its story is nothing but a gross misunderstanding of how websites work by both a state agency and the governor of said state. Vandeven was going to thank the paper for finding the vulnerability. After meeting with the governor's office, her tone became accusatory.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol, which is appointed by the governor, started a probe into the newspaper story. Cole County Prosecuting Attorney Locke Thompson received the case on Monday, December 27. The governor held a press conference on Wednesday, December 29, where he suggested that Thompson use a state statute related to computer tampering to prosecute Renaud and the paper.
In the press conference, he compared the actions of Renaud to someone using a lock pick to enter a home. Which is not an appropriate analogy. The websites are public. They are similar to public buildings, not homes. If a person walks by a locked room in a state-owned building and sees a bunch of sensitive information posted in the window for anyone to see, it's an apt analogy.
I would like someone to knock on the door and point out the problem without fear of prosecution by a man who doesn't know how websites work.
