Escambia County has filed suit against Jonathan Owens, aide to former County Commissioner Doug Underhill, Alexander Arduini and Gannett, owner of the Pensacola News Journal, seeking recovery of data stolen of the county’s server.
In early 2022, the commissioner had trouble with his cell phone and had asked the county’s IT department to help retrieve the data so that he could preserve the information considered to be public records. Someone stole the data off the county’s server and gave it Owens, who then passed it on to attorneys suing the county, the once-daily newspapers and others. Owens has told the media the information was given to him anonymously.
Inweekly asked Bergosh had he or anyone questioned former IT director Bart Sider about how the data could have been downloaded undetected off the servers under his supervision. Sider resigned in August 2022. This past summer, the county ask the FBI to investigate the matter.
“I believe (Sider) has been spoken with by the agents looking into this,” Bergosh said. “I personally spoke with him. I was very disappointed. I’ve known him for 20 years. He and I coached together, our kids play ball together. He told me unequivocally that he had no idea how it happened. I’d like to be a guy that takes him at his word.”
The commissioner continued, “My understanding is when he was approached by law enforcement, he got a lawyer. So I don’t know what to think, and I don’t think a lot of us will know what to think until we are able to read the report, which is classified confidential right now until the U.S. attorney gets done looking at it and makes his determination whether or not he was enough to prosecute.”
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Amazing~!
One of Doug and Jonathan’s disinformation specialties is to speak an untruth over and over to drive it into people’s brains. Just because Jonathan says it got slipped under his door–no wait, it appeared on his desk–that does not mean it actually happened. In fact with how those two operate, it’s more likely that’s an intentional smoke screen. One of the easiest ways to determine what Doug was up to was to hear him emphatically repeat some talking point or anecdotal detail three times, even twice, and know the exact opposite was the truth.
The entire time the previous IT head was there, the tech savvy guys in our household tore their hair out at his security and software decisions. The manner in which he set things up for people to access the County system when off campus was particularly problematic and risky. During Edler’s suit against me, he laid down in public record email a bunch of malarkey about County phones, the Cloud, and, if memory serves, Smarsh (or some other program) that he apparently figured would go over my head, but didn’t figure on others who know better assessing its inaccuracy. I knew from that point on he wasn’t a trustworthy individual.
The possibility that bothers me the most is how many back doors have been installed for the Clerk of Court during his time of being the previous administrator’s number one fan (not to mention seeming to be completely snowed by Doug’s claims to cyber expertise, when it came out in deposition that, surprising to nobody who understands how he rolls with his rubbish, he doesn’t hold a single cert). Once at a meeting I was having trouble logging in to the County’s wifi, and spoke with the IT director about it in the lobby. After he was done mansplaining me about how to Control-F to find something, he proudly detailed just how closely he was working with the Clerk’s IT department to get the County’s systems in order and secure. He outright boasted about working with Pam’s IT people fist in glove, and I thought, Oh boy.
Which probably explains a big reason why the County’s tech developed into such a mess during that time, with functionality tanking, losing Swagit for meetings, so much functionality being transferred to the Clerk (whose own systems for County records have deteriorated immensely in the last few years), and why our system was left so wide open that the laptop on the podium connected directly with the County’s cloud–no firewall in place, at all, until he had left and CMR discovered the problem and fixed it.
Of course it’s not like there weren’t issues before he arrived; Kevin and I busting the encryption software that Doug et al had the IT department develop apart from the County Attorney’s knowledge being just one example. (That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the program, and it’s necessary and helpful for a lot of things–it’s just how it was implemented with only a handful of people in the beginning knowing about it, the attorney not being one.)
We’ve always felt like Doug had access to everything on the County server, protected or not. Although he doesn’t have the technical expertise to do that himself, he certainly knows people who can, and the County’s tech has hardly been a bastion of security the entire time Doug was in office. Doug serially chasing away IT directors and many of the best and brightest IT personnel was, in my opinion, in service to him being able to manipulate and abuse the County’s systems.
People keep talking about it as a fact that Jonathan was slipped those texts. It’s a possibility they simply scooped it off the server once that it was uploaded. In that possible case, the question that would need to be asked is not “Who gave Jonathan the thumb drive” but “Who tipped the D2 office to Bergosh’s texts being on the server?”