Sun Sentinel42%
Florida officials creepily investigate citizen critics 55%
By Scott Maxwell71%
8/2/2026, 4:00:20 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Anecdotal, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 45.3% saturation with 343 hits. Analysis detected 1,843 faulty-reasoning hits from 758 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 46.7% and a BS Rank of 55% (12,333 of 27,348 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 54.90% of the article peer group.
I still remember the day, years ago, when I learned that one of Central Florida’s more notorious figures, then-Seminole County Tax Collector Joel Greenberg, was trying to dig up dirt on me — and my wife — and possibly breaking the law to do so.
I’d written a lot of critical pieces about Greenberg, since he was basically the elected incarnation of a Dumpster fire.
And the newspaper learned that he had used a database meant to help cops investigate criminals to instead investigate a local journalist and his spouse.
Also some of his political rivals.
And friends.
And Britney Spears.
(Joel was an odd duck.)
Anyway, Greenberg didn’t find anything on me or my saintly wife.
But it was still wildly inappropriate for a public official to use a database meant for criminals to try to target people he personally disliked.
Which brings us to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Orlando Sentinel reporter Jeff Schweers has uncovered how officials at the state agency that’s supposed to protect wildlife had been using the same state database against Floridians who’d had the audacity to publicly criticize the agency.
One was a documentary filmmaker who’d made a film critical of the way he believed the state agency failed to protect gopher tortoises.
Another was an environmental advocate from Apopka who’d vocally criticized the agency’s board members for green-lighting bear hunts.
(He had his driving records accessed more than two dozen times.)
Yet another was actually an elected official — a Republican property appraiser in conservative Taylor County — who had, along with her husband, accused FWC officers of being overly forceful and making unjustified arrests with citizens around the state.
Public records documented and revealed that all the searches had been run, sometimes many times, on critics of the agency.
Such is life in the “Free State of Florida,” where you’d better not open your mouth in any kind of dissent.
Now, unauthorized use of the state’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database (DAVID) is illegal.
In fact, just a few years ago, state lawmakers voted to beef up the penalties for anyone caught using the database for improper reasons.
They did this partly in reaction to — you guessed it — Joel Greenberg.
After the now-incarcerated felon had been charged with stealing identifications and creating fake IDs.
In explaining why the state takes these abuses so seriously, legislative analysts explained at the time that the searches could reveal private information, including Social Security numbers and medical and disability information.
The analysts’ pull-no-punches conclusion: “Misuse of an electronic database is a violation of an officer’s good moral character.”
Seems pretty clear, right?
So what does Gov.
Ron DeSantis’ fish and wildlife office have to say for itself?
That its staffers did everything right and that anyone suggesting otherwise is wrong.
FWC Spokeswoman Shannon Knowles said news stories from the Sentinel and the Miami Herald, which also wrote about the database use, “mischaracterized” the agency’s actions.
“Claims that the FWC misuses or weaponizes its law enforcement authority are false,” she wrote in an email.
I asked Knowles if the state had conducted any kind of investigation into its own employees’ use of the system.
She didn’t answer that, but said use of the system “is permitted only for legitimate law enforcement purposes.”
Knowles then stressed that “Threats concerning the harming of officers, staff and Commissioners are taken seriously …”
So at this point, I guess we’re supposed to believe or imply that threats of violent criminal activity were coming from … a documentary filmmaker.
And a dozen or so other wildlife advocates.
And the Taylor County property appraiser.
So prove it.
Show the credible justification for why the FWC conducted every single one of the criminal-database snooping checks it ran on people who’d dared to criticize the agency.
(And that means a lot more than the handful of threatening messages released by the FWC after the story, none of which were tied to the people who were spied on.)
Where the hell is the accountability?
Especially from guys like DeSantis, his chief-of-staff-turned-attorney-general James Uthmeier and CFO Blaise Ingoglia, Republicans who constantly throw tantrums about how they don’t believe local Democratic officials are doing their jobs properly.
Can you imagine if offices run by Democrats were caught running DAVID checks on citizens who criticized them?
That Tallahassee trio would be staging a Category 5 hissy fit that would make the cast of “Mean Girls” blush.
Scott Maxwell is an Orlando Sentinel columnist.
Contact him at smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com.
Speakers
2speakers12%attributed speech669writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageFWC Spokeswoman Shannon Knowles
78 attributed words88% of attributed speech92% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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