“Florida man seeks to create a state counterintelligence unit and claim sweeping surveillance powers over people whose ‘views’ or ‘opinions’ he dislikes.” It’s not nearly as amusing as the usual “Florida man” headline, and it may lead to a blueprint for lawmakers far beyond Florida.
If Florida enacts House Bill 945it will create a national first – CIA-style structure at the state level that blurs the traditional line between state law enforcement and intelligence work. It likely wouldn’t remain a local experiment. Red states often borrow aggressively from one another’s policy playbooks, on everything from gerrymandering to anti-abortion laws to transporting immigrants to Democratic-led states. A state-level intelligence office empowered to scrutinize residents based on ideology is precisely the kind of proposal likely to spread once normalized.
The bill would create an operational intelligence office charged with identifying and disrupting threats to Florida and the United States. That alone should raise questions. The federal government already spends enormous sums (by some accounts, trillions of dollars since 11 September 2001) on national security and counterterrorism. Why should states duplicate those functions without demonstrating a clear need, specialized expertise, or meaningful oversight?
It could be not only wasteful but dangerous. One of the core lessons of the 9/11 commission was that fragmented intelligence systems and siloed operations can undermine security rather than enhance it. After September 11, Congress created the National Counterterrorism Center precisely to prevent disconnected intelligence operations from proliferating. HB 945 moves in the opposite direction, inviting a patchwork of state-run intelligence units operating outside a unified federal framework, recreating the very fragmentation federal reforms tried to fix.
Even more troubling is how easily such a system could be misused. Although the bill’s sponsor, the Tampa area Republican representative Danny Alvarez, says he’s going to make changes to address civil liberties concerns, it’s difficult to imagine any linguistic fix that could salvage legislation like this.
The bill’s language allows scrutiny based on “views” and “opinions”, a standard that echoes some of the darkest chapters of American surveillance history. In the 1960s and 70s, the FBI’s Cointelpro program infiltrated protest movements, monitored journalists, and targeted civil rights leaders – not for crimes, but beliefs.
Public outrage over those abuses led to the Church Committee investigation and new guardrails, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to prevent domestic spying based on ideology.
Yet even federal agencies with decades of experience, extensive training and formal oversight have struggled to resist overreach. Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures revealed that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) – designed to monitor foreigners abroad – swept up Americans’ communications and was repeatedly misused to query information about protesters, journalists, and lawmakers. Since then, efforts to enact meaningful reforms have stalled. Congress instead expanded Section 702 authority, for example with 2024’s “spy draft” amendment enabling the involuntary conscription of US businesses and individuals to spy on the government’s behalf.
As toothless as it has often proven, Fisa is intended to restrain the federal government – its drafters likely never contemplated a state involving itself in surveillance and counterintelligence in the manner Florida proposes. If the feds, with their institutional expertise and legal constraints, cannot consistently avoid abusing surveillance powers, why should we assume newly created state intelligence offices will do better?
The political context heightens the concern. Florida officials have already labeled advocacy groups and protest movements as security threats, and debates over “wokeness”, Palestine activism, and immigration have increasingly been framed in national security terms. In fact, the state legislature is also considering another bill – SB 1632 – to expand the definition of domestic terrorism and the state’s powers to combat “ideologies inconsistent with American principles”.
HB 945 would give future state administrations – Republican or Democratic – a powerful tool to monitor ideological opponents. Today’s targets might be pro-Palestinian activists or anti-ICE protesters; tomorrow’s could be anti-abortion organizations, racial justice advocates, or any movement out of favor with those in power. Surveillance authorities, once created, rarely disappear, and rarely stay confined to their original purpose.
Florida’s current leaders are also longstanding adversaries of press freedom. Throughout the history of domestic surveillance, journalists have been among those targeted, from Nixon-era snooping to the Obama administration’s seizure of phone records from the Associated Press to this year’s FBI raid targeting the Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson. It would be no different at the state level.
State legislatures have spent the past decade exporting policy models across ideological lines. If HB 945 becomes law, lawmakers in other conservative states will almost certainly introduce similar proposals, arguing that Florida has already paved the way. A network of state intelligence offices, each empowered to scrutinize residents’ beliefs, would fundamentally reshape the landscape of domestic surveillance – not through a single sweeping federal statute, but through dozens of smaller state laws advancing in parallel.
The first amendment protects unpopular opinions, harsh criticism of government officials, and controversial ideologies precisely because political majorities change. But even if courts ultimately strike down laws that punish speech or association, litigation takes years, and the chilling effect begins immediately. The mere possibility that lawful political expression could land someone in an intelligence database can be enough to deter dissent.
If Florida succeeds, it may take 50 Church Committees and 50 separate reform packages to have any hope of beginning to clean up the decentralized mess.
