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 945, it 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’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.
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.
The CIA does whatever they want, shirt brother. They always have.
•HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS (New York Times Dec. 1974)
•2022: How the CIA Is Acting Outside the Law to Spy on Americans
•Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) domestic espionage project targeting American citizens operating from 1967 to 1974, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson and expanded under President Richard Nixon, whose mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war, and other protest movements. The operation was launched under Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms by chief of counter-intelligence James Jesus Angleton, and headed by Richard Ober.
•The 1975-76 Church Committee congressional hearings probed widespread intelligence abuses by the FBI, CIA, IRS and NSA. Headed by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the committee exposed how under the guise of national security agencies spied on American citizens for political purposes during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations.
•2014: Former Church Committee Calls for New Investigative Panel
They also seemed to realize a long time ago they could get away with even more unconstitutional shit with even less oversight by outsourcing domestic surveillance to private contractors like Wackenhut (which would eventually become current ICE contractor, GEO Group)
•Many of the Wackenhut documents and a series on student movements in California highlight the suspected connections between Communism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and the broader left counterculture of the 1960s, and document the right's evolving definition of "subversion."
•Ice contractor plans for surveillance boom under Trump migrant crackdown: Geo Group, an Ice partner, is moving at ‘unprecedented speed’ to build out its monitoring, executive chair says
•3 weeks ago: The Central Intelligence Agency said it’s overhauling how it procures technology from the private sector, as part of an effort to more quickly adopt leading-edge capabilities for use in its missions. The new acquisition framework, made public Monday, involves a centralized vendor vetting system and a streamlined IT authorization process to “significantly reduce the time between when CIA defines a mission requirement and when it receives operating authority,” the agency said in a prepared statement.