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According to emails obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Missouri state officials planned to thank the publication for alerting it to a major security issue on a government website. Ultimately, however, the governor ended up threatening criminal charges.

Readers may recall a bizarre story last month in which Gov. Mike Parson (R-MO) threatened criminal charges against a journalist for simply accessing the HTML source code of a state government website. To be clear, this is something anyone with a web browser can do and is completely legal.

On the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website, reporter Josh Renaud discovered teachers’ social security numbers contained in the code, though the SSNs were not clearly visible on the webpages themselves.

Before running the story, the Post-Dispatch contacted the DESE and alerted them of the issue. The paper agreed only to publish until after it was fixed.

But instead of thanking Renaud for catching the problem, Parsons threatened to investigate him for hacking. “We are coordinating state resources to respond and utilize all legal methods available,” Parson said at the time. “My

administration has notified the Cole County prosecutor of this matter. The Missouri State Highway Patrol’s digital forensic unit will also be conducting an investigation of all of those involved.”

As the newly obtained emails show, however, Parson’s meritless freakout was very far from the response the DESE proposed to his office. According to the Post-Dispatch:

In an Oct. 12 email to officials in Gov. Mike Parson’s office, Mallory McGowin, spokeswoman for DESE, sent proposed statements for a press release announcing the data vulnerability the newspaper uncovered.

“We are grateful to the member of the media who brought this to the state’s attention,” said a proposed quote from Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven.
The Parson administration and DESE did not end up using that quote.

The next day, on Oct. 13, the Office of Administration issued a news release calling the Post-Dispatch journalist a “hacker.”

Moreover, state officials forwarded their correspondence with the Post-Dispatch to the FBI. Again, this was all because Renaud did something on a webpage that you can do legally right now by right-clicking on this page in Google Chrome and then selecting “View Page Source.”

If you just did that, congrats. You’ve “hacked” Mediaite according to the governor of Missouri.

Tags: FBI, hacking, Josh Renaud, Mike Parson, Missouri, St. Louis Post Dispatch