You may not be paying attention to what's going on in Missouri, but what the governor is trying to do is wild.

The condensed version is the St. Louis Dispatch, with the help of Shaji Khan from the University of Missouri - St. Louis, discovered a flaw on the DESE website that was leaking SSNs of teachers in Missouri. They discovered that if you just hit F12 and opened developer tools you could find base64 encoded SSNs in the code. The Governor Mike Parson is accusing them of hacking and decoding HTML. The St. Louis dispatch did everything right and notified DESE so the site was either fixed or shutdown so the data wouldn't be leaked.

We need researchers out there finding vulnerabilities and flaws. We should be celebrating them finding the flaw and addressing it directly before publishing the story. Instead, they are being threatened with criminal prosecution. If this goes through it's going to set an extremely dangerous precedence that will make us all more vulnerable.

ZDNet does a good job of providing an overview.  Shaji Khan is also asking for an apology.

Cybersecurity expert demands apology from Missouri governor over hacking claims • Missouri Independent

Missouri governor faces backlash and ridicule for threatening reporter who discovered exposed teacher SSNs | ZDNet