ST. LOUIS – Does Governor Parson owe a reporter and a newspaper an apology? He says, "Most certainly not."
Earlier this month, a Missouri prosecutor announced he would not charge a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist who exposed a flaw in a state database that allowed public access to thousands of teachers’ Social Security numbers.
It was recently revealed that the flaw had been in place since 2011. As reported by KrebsOnSecurity, the responsibility of securing the state's IT systems, including the database security flaw, falls under the responsibility of the Missouri governor and the Office of Administration.
Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson's statement said, there is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law, and that the issues at the heart of the investigation have been resolved through non-legal means, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. “As such, it is not in the best interest of Cole County citizens to utilize the significant resources and taxpayer dollars that would be necessary to pursue misdemeanor criminal charges in this case,” Thompson said.
A 158-page report also showed that reporter Josh Renaud hadn’t accessed “anything that was not publicly available, nor was he in a place he should not have been,” according to a Missouri Highway Patrol interview with DESE spokeswoman Mallory McGowin.
As reported in ArsTechnica, a newly released police report thoroughly debunks Parson's baffling claim that a journalist who helped the state identify and fix a website security flaw was a "hacker" and criminal.
KMOX News asked Governor Parson at an appearance Tuesday, whether he feels he now owes the paper and reporter an apology. "Number one, what the prosecutor said was that he didn't want to go forward with the expense of a trial. He never said the law wasn't broken."
Parson says questions remain about the Post story showing state education workers private data was accessible, including, "did they really get information out of there and did they take people's personal information? And the question becomes, what did they do with it?"
The Post has claimed it only did the story to show that the state needed to shore up its website to protect the privacy of state workers.