A Clear Violation Of Our Terms Of Service

A journalist with the  St. Louis Post-Dispatch discovered a security issue on a website maintained by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). By conducting a search & then reading the HTML source code for the returned records, anyone could find the Social Security numbers of teachers & staff .

The paper immediately notified DESE, which in turn the Missouri Office of Administration’s Information Technology Services Division, who verified the vulnerability and disabled the search function, until the problem could be addressed, at a preliminary estimate of  $50 million to be borne by already angry & heavily-armed taxpayers.

The paper also agreed to withhold the story until the vulnerability had been patched.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson is a Republican, so it’s only fair he knew this could be a great opportunity to jump on the Turdwaffle bandwagon by vowing to investigate the news story as a leak by a hacker & “hold accountable all those who aided this hacker and the fake news corporation that employs them.”

This approach, of course, is predicated on the premise that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” & as long as you’re in power the status quo is doing just fine, thank you. It’s not like the taxpayers originally paid for the defective Website to begin with, did they?

What’s next? Prosecuting Website visitors for obscure violatons of obscure passages in Software Licensing or Terms Of Service Agreements that are designed to have user click through them without a care in the world?

What exactly is the Governor worried we hackers might find by reading the publicly exposed HTML on his sites that can be viewed in most modern browsers by users with little or no coding ability?

Hackers! Ready your keyboards! Show us what you got, Missouri!