The ‘Free State of Florida’ is watching — and withholding

Florida’s leaders are fond of calling our sunny corner of the country the “Free State of Florida.” But that freedom becomes an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak when the government watches its critics, shields its decisions from public scrutiny, and treats dissent as a potential security threat.

While no single recent episode proves that Florida has abandoned its commitment to free expression and open government, taken together, the pattern is hard to dismiss.

The most immediate warning is a new Florida law that gives the state’s chief of domestic security, with the approval of the governor and Cabinet, power to designate organizations as domestic or foreign terrorist groups.

A designation can trigger dissolution of a corporation, loss of public funding and benefits, penalties for defined forms of material support, and serious consequences for students and campus groups accused of promoting a named group.

A companion law allows information connected with the designation process to be withheld on security grounds. Whatever one thinks of the first organizations targeted, the precedent should trouble everyone. Today it may be a group you despise. Tomorrow it may be yours.

The law took effect July 1, and Gov. Ron DeSantis has identified organizations he wants to label as terrorist groups. But the state told a federal court it would wait to make formal designations until the Florida Department of Law Enforcement completes the required rules.

That pause came amid litigation over the governor’s earlier executive order targeting the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood — an order a federal judge preliminarily enjoined on March 4 on First Amendment and other constitutional grounds.

The pause has not prevented the chill. At a Florida university with prominent activist groups, a student journalist told the First Amendment Foundation, of which I am the executive director, that organizations now refuse to be covered or quoted for fear of attracting state scrutiny. Other outlets are trying to figure out if writing about banned groups might be considered “promotion” under the law.

The dynamic recalls machinery once used by Southern states to intimidate civil rights organizations by treating dissent and association as threats to public order. In its landmark 1958 ruling in NAACP v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized how compelled disclosure of an organization’s membership could expose its members to economic reprisal, hostility, and coercion.

Florida was once celebrated for having some of the nation’s strongest public records and open meetings laws. Today, people seeking government information increasingly encounter delay, denial, excessive charges, or silence. More than 1,200 exemptions now riddle Florida’s public records laws. During the 2026 legislative session, lawmakers introduced more than 50 bills that would further limit access, although fewer than 10 ultimately passed.

Those numbers reveal a deeper cultural shift. Disclosure is increasingly treated as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a constitutional obligation.

That shift was evident in the transfer of valuable Miami Dade College land for President Donald Trump’s proposed presidential library. After a judge found that a challenge to the college’s inadequately noticed vote had a substantial likelihood of success, Attorney General James Uthmeier joined the college’s defense, called the lawsuit “bogus,” and supported an interpretation under which Florida’s Sunshine Law required little more than logistical notice of a meeting — not meaningful notice of the public business to be decided.

The dispute was ultimately rendered moot after the college held a new, more specifically noticed meeting and voted again. However, it did not erase the troubling choice by Florida’s chief legal officer to argue for a narrower public right to know.

Those who gather news or criticize public officials are now also under pressure.

In November 2025, photojournalist Dave Decker was covering a protest outside the Krome immigration detention center in Miami-Dade County. He was arrested by sheriff’s deputies even though he wore press credentials and repeatedly identified himself as a journalist.

Decker was charged with trespassing after warning and resisting an officer without violence. All charges were dismissed on December 16 after press freedom organizations, including the First Amendment Foundation and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), protested the arrest. The dismissal did not erase the warning: A journalist documenting official action was treated as part of the opposition because his camera was pointed in the government’s direction.

Then there is the postcard.

Florida resident James O’Gara mailed state Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia a postcard in August 2025 containing three words: “You lack values.” On September 15, the Department of Financial Services opened a threat assessment. Two weeks later, armed investigators from its Criminal Investigations Division arrived at O’Gara’s home in Largo wearing tactical vests emblazoned with “Police.”

When they first appeared, the investigators did not introduce themselves or tell O’Gara’s wife Cathy, who answered the door, which agency they represented. The family learned days later, with help from Largo police, that their visitors worked for the Department of Financial Services. The agency eventually said the investigation found no credible threat, that James O’Gara was not in trouble, and that there was nothing unlawful about his postcard.

The visit nevertheless conveyed a message. When armed state agents appear at someone’s home over clearly political criticism — without initially saying who they are or what agency sent them — most citizens do not need to be arrested to feel intimidated.

More recently, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission acknowledged that employees used the state’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database to retrieve sensitive personal information about agency critics. Reporting has since identified nearly two dozen people whose records were searched, some repeatedly. The commission defended the inquiries as security-related, pointing in part to threats surrounding contentious public meetings. That rationale raises its own concern: Attending a government meeting and criticizing an agency are core democratic activities and cannot, on their own, justify quietly searching a restricted law enforcement database.

Florida is also investing heavily in systems capable of expanding surveillance. In June, the governor and Cabinet approved $87 million in immigration enforcement grants, including requests for AI-enabled vehicle cameras and software that combines dispatch records, agency files, and license-plate-reader data in a single system. Without strict limits, audits, and transparency, such tools give the government unprecedented power to map people’s movements, associations, and activities.

The state Legislature has already shown where this machinery could lead. Introduced during the 2026 session, House Bill 945 would have created a statewide counterintelligence and counterterrorism unit empowered to examine people and organizations whose “actions, views, or opinions” were considered threatening or inimical to Florida or the United States. That language would have placed political belief within reach of a domestic intelligence service. The bill advanced through three committees before dying in the House State Affairs Committee on March 13. Its failure was welcome, but a proposal that traveled that far should not be regarded as gone for good.

Freedom is measured by whether critics can speak, journalists can document, citizens can assemble, and the public can discover what its government is doing.

By that measure, the “Free State of Florida” is falling dangerously short of its name — and becoming considerably more secret.