Back in October of last year Irreal recounted the hilarious but sad tale of the Missouri governor trying to press charges against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for discovering, notifying the state, and then reporting on the fact that a state Web site had exposed the social security numbers of hundreds of thousands of teachers. Governor Mike Parson was not amused and threatened to bring charges against the reporter for “hacking” despite the fact that the social security numbers were embedded in the site’s HTML and visible to anyone simply by selecting their browser’s “show source” option.
The governor enlisted the State Police and the State Attorney General to investigate the matter. In a splendid example of the adage that you should be careful of what you wish for, the State Police and Attorney General did investigate.
Brian Krebbs is reporting that the results of that investigation is that the governor’s office is responsible for the leak. They also concluded that the reporter and his paper did nothing wrong.
There’s nothing venal in all of this. Whoever built the site was incredibly incompetent, of course, but as Irreal readers know, there’s a lot of that going around. If the governor hadn’t weighed in, it would have been a one day story of “diligent reporter discovers data leak in state website that has since been fixed.” Now the story is that the governor is a clueless moron who was attempting to cover up a serious screw up of his office by trying to shoot the messenger.
I don’t know if Parson is a good or bad governor but I do know that he’s ignorant about the Internet and should refrain from expressing his opinions on its technical aspects. To do otherwise is to invite the ridicule that he’s receiving and so richly deserves.