Parson is wrong to prosecute reporter

This week in Missouri our governor wants to prosecute a reporter for revealing a defect in the state’s management of personal information.

When our nation was founded, the importance of a free exchange of ideas and the ability of an independent press to hold leaders accountable was so important, it was included in the First Amendment.

But it has become an all too common practice today to villainize those who question authority.

Our government, whether local, state, or federal, cannot be permitted to prosecute or attack everyone who dares question their authority.

Countries like Russia and China regularly lay charges against those individuals who try to hold leaders accountable for misdeeds and poor policy.

But our country chose 230 years ago to take a different path, to uphold freedom in all its forms, including freedom of the press.

We’re disappointed in Gov. Mike Parson’s actions this week regarding the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s reporting of a state website problem.

“The state is committed to bring to justice anyone who hacked our system and anyone who aided and abetted them to do so,” Parson said in a news conference reported on last week by the Missouri Independent.

He later argued the reporter was “attempting to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet,” the Missouri Independent shared.

The state website had posted Social Security numbers belonging to hundreds of teachers in an unsecured area.

The information was visible to anyone who understood how to read website coding, according to reporting on the matter. The Post Dispatch notified state officials of the problem and did not report on the matter until the information was removed from the site, a further attempt, according to the paper, to protect those involved.

Chris Vickery, a California-based data security expert, told the Missouri Independent in an interview last week that it appears the department of education was “publishing data that it shouldn’t have been publishing.

“That’s not a crime for the journalists discovering it,” he said. “Putting Social Security numbers within HTML, even if it’s ‘non-display rendering’ HTML, is a stupid thing for the Missouri website to do and is a type of boneheaded mistake that has been around since day one of the internet. No exploit, hacking or vulnerability is involved here.”

We have spoken several times with Parson in the past and praise his efforts to support infrastructure improvements and workforce development across the state. We know he has been instrumental in efforts that have benefited Butler County, including grant funding that is supporting the expansion of Highway 67 south as a future interstate route.

But Parson’s decision this week to call for the prosecution of the individual who reported on the data breach is politics at its worst.

Parson’s actions are more like something we would expect to hear about in a country that values freedoms less than we do in the United States.

We feel it’s important to remember the precedence this sets.

Would you rather your personal data remain visible on a state website the next time, because the reporter who might question our elected officials could face prosecution for revealing the state’s error?

We know how we would answer that question.