Missouri GOP governor's bid to jail reporter who revealed government website security flaw ends with a whimper

Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson last year attacked a St. Louis Dispatch reporter who discovered a security flaw in a government website that exposed the personal information of Missouri teachers.

When the reporter reported it to the authorities it wasn't met with a "thank you," but an outright attack and threats of arrest by Parson.

Now, he's being vindicated.

Parson hosted an Oct. 2021 press conference where he said he expected a Cole County prosecuting attorney would bring charges against the reporter. For the past six months, the governor's office has called the reporter a "hacker," when all he did was check the source code of the site with a right-click on his browser. Parson's office even went so far as to say that the reporter may have clicked eight times to access the information.

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It turns out that law enforcement didn't find that the reporter did anything wrong. He isn't a hacker, as Parsons tried to claim. In fact, far from it.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch cited the 158-page report from the Missouri Highway Patrol, showing that reporter Josh Renaud never accessed “anything that was not publicly available, nor was he in a place he should not have been."

To make things worse, state education department spokeswoman Mallory McGowin revealed that the probe discovered that the "vulnerability that left 576,000 teacher Social Security numbers exposed... would have been there since 2011, when the application was implemented."

Bloomberg News was also able to obtain several emails that reveal that the governor's office was desperately trying to figure out how they could use this to their own political benefit.

Read the full report.