In his dystopian novel “1984,” George Orwell warned that a dictator would create a surveillance state masked as something beneficial. The hallmark of the evil regime was its slogan: “Big Brother Is Watching You.”
These days most people think “Big Brother” refers to a TV show. But it turns out we’ve got the Orwellian version of Big Brother operating here in the supposedly Free State of Florida.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has repeatedly pulled the driving records of more than a dozen of its critics, especially targeting those who opposed its bear hunt.
Both the Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald blew the lid off this scandal over the weekend. “FWC secretly investigated outspoken environmental activists, records show,” the Sentinel reported, while the Herald announced, “FWC looks at its critics’ info in database meant for criminal probes.”
The suspicion, the Sentinel said, is that the FWC used those driving records to find the critics’ travel patterns employing the Flock cameras that dot our highways. That way, the state agency can keep tabs on where they go and who they meet.
One target of this kooky covert operation: Katrina Shadix, founder of Bear Warriors United. She works for more than just bears. Last year her organization successfully sued the state for allowing pollution of the Indian River Lagoon that led to a mass die-off of manatees.
The Herald reported that the FWC’s nosy parkers pulled her driving records 17 times between 2023 and 2025. In those searches, the FWC claimed she was under criminal investigation — but she wasn’t.
You might think the FWC’s top leader would deny doing something so clearly illegal. You would be wrong.
Rodney Barreto, the politically influential Miami developer who chairs the wildlife commission, admitted to pulling the records but attempted to shrug it off as no big deal. He told the Herald commissioners had received threats during the debate over the bear hunt, so FWC officers checked out the environmentalists.
“When people sign up to speak, their names are checked,” Barreto told the Herald. “That’s all.”
There’s just one thing wrong with Barreto’s excuse: Some of the people whose records they pulled have never set foot in an FWC meeting.
They know where you live
I’d love to tell you that the Florida version of Woodward and Bernstein uncovered this scandal, but I can’t. The person who figured it out was a documentary filmmaker named Brent Fannin.
Fannin has made such films as “The Water State,” about a water bottler sucking a spring dry, and “Gopher Games,” showing how developers wipe out gopher tortoise habitat. But he’s never attended a single FWC meeting, he told me.
He’s not a fan of the sitting commission, though. The people in charge are campaign contributors to the governor who appointed them. And most of them hail from the development industry.
Fannin drafted a bill for the Legislature, introduced last year by state Rep. Anna Eskamani, that called for requiring wildlife commissioners to be scientists, environmental experts, and local officials. The bill died in committee. Then Fannin got a tip that he’d made enemies.
“I got an email that said, ‘The FWC is watching you,’ he told me. “’They know where you live, what you drive, and all your social accounts.’”
He filed a public records request for any FWC records about himself. The wildlife commission turned him down.
“They told me, ‘We can’t give that to you because it’s part of an open criminal investigation,’” he said. That was the first he’d heard of any investigation.
Fannin felt stymied by the FWC’s stonewalling. But then he heard about a federal lawsuit filed against the FWC by the Taylor County property appraiser and her husband over a deer-hunting case.
The suit accused FWC officers of retaliating against the couple for complaints they’d filed previously. More importantly, it accused FWC officers of illegally accessing the couple’s driving records.
Inspired, Fannin filed his own request with the Florida Department of Vehicle Safety and Motor Vehicles to see who had accessed his driving records.
This time, he hit pay dirt.
Two FWC employees had pulled Fannin’s driving records. They had done so seven times in April and June 2025. The reason they gave for tapping into his records was that supposed “criminal investigation.”
He urged others who had been critical of the commission to submit requests. So far, 16 environmental activists have learned their records had been pulled.
One was Valerie Anderson, president of the Friends of Split Oak Forest. She spoke out against the wildlife commission’s decision to approve a toll road slicing through the Split Oak Forest Preserve in Orange County.
“I wasn’t surprised but I was very annoyed,” Anderson told me. “They’re taking liberties with having law enforcement capabilities.”
Another was Rhonda Roff, who leads the Sierra Club’s Calusa Chapter in Southwest Florida. She had an interesting take on the FWC.
“They’re afraid of us,” she told me. “This shows what a bunch of bullies they are. Bullies are always scaredy cats.”
Then there was Ryan Worthington, a podcaster whose YouTube channel is called “The Florida Excursionist.”
When he learned the FWC was watching him, Worthington told me, “I really couldn’t believe it. It made me ponder why they’d want to scrutinize me.”
The justification for peeking at all these private records was listed as a “criminal investigation.” However, as the Orlando Sentinel reported, “an agency spokesperson acknowledged to the Sentinel last week that there are no current investigations of the activists.”
Maybe the agency meant the investigation itself was openly criminal.
Abusing DAVID
At this point you may be thinking, “So they pulled people’s driving records. Big deal. Where’s the harm?”
They’re not JUST driving records.
“The records were in the Driver and Vehicle Information Database, known as DAVID,” the Herald reported. “The system contains people’s driving records and other sensitive information like their Social Security numbers, medical disability records, addresses, signatures and emergency contacts.”
You can see why the law limits who can see those documents.
“Only authorized people, usually law-enforcement officers, can pull DAVID records, and there needs to be an official reason to do so,” the Herald explained.
The temptation to sneak a peek at DAVID turns a lot of cops turn into outlaws.
WTSP-TV did an investigation in 2021 that revealed that lots of Florida government employees had been abusing DAVID. The TV station found that “more than 900 state and local workers have gotten caught misusing that access since 2015, some using it to track their former romantic partners.”
Then there was the state trooper who, in 2011, caught an off-duty Miami cop going 120 mph to his side gig. After the arrest made headlines, the trooper began getting harassing phone calls. Police cars drove slowly by her house.
She found that 88 officers from 25 agencies had used DAVID to access her personal information. The trooper sued multiple officers and police agencies for violations of the federal Driver Privacy Information Act. They all settled with her, paying out thousands of dollars.
As a result, the Legislature passed a law in 2021 that toughened penalties for misuse of the DAVID system from $500 per incident to $2,000.
I contacted the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Ed Hooper, R-Palm Harbor. He was too cautious to accuse the FWC of wrongdoing, but said, “If they’re found to have violated the law, they should face the consequences.”
The man most hated
The target of the most FWC records searches was Chuck O’Neal, founder of a group called Speak Up Wekiva. He’s been a thorn in the agency’s side for years.
In 2015, when the FWC voted to hold the first bear hunt in 21 years, O’Neal sued to stop it. It’s too bad he lost, considering that hunt turned into a public relations debacle for the agency.
When the FWC voted to hold its more recent hunt, O’Neal worked with other protesters to grab some of the hunting permits for non-hunters, thus guaranteeing the survival of quite a few bears.
O’Neal also chaired the “No to 2” campaign, which in 2024 fought against a proposed constitutional amendment — backed by Barreto — that enshrined the right to hunting and fishing in the Florida Constitution.The amendment’s passage was used to justify the bear hunt.
When I asked him how it felt to be the person the FWC seemed most worried about, he laughed.
“Being the most hated by the FWC is a badge of honor of sorts,” he told me. But then he said it was also unnerving: “I think they wanted to find something embarrassing to discredit me.”
Instead, it’s made him more sought-after than ever. After the news broke, he said, “within about an hour I was contacted by five attorneys, most of them offering to represent me pro bono. That’s how popular the FWC is right now.”
O’Neal is indeed planning to sue the snoopy troopers for their sneaky surveillance. Contrary to Barreto’s comments about “threats,” O’Neal is the kind of guy who reaches first for an attorney, not an AK-47.
That goes double for Shadix.
Digging holes
Shadix has experience in turning adversity into an advantage.
Years ago, she badly injured her back in a car accident. She used the $300,000 legal settlement to launch her Bear Warriors United organization.
When she found out she was under double-secret surveillance by the FWC, she said, “I was super-jazzed! After a decade of fighting their corruption, they’ve dug their own hole!”
I didn’t need to ask “what corruption?” The FWC has seen one recent scandal after another.
FWC employees stood by and did nothing as 31 sloths died in an unlicensed Orlando warehouse. They let aquarium suppliers capture an endangered giant manta ray for exhibition in Abu Dhabi. They mistakenly killed a pregnant boa constrictor worth $100,000 that was legally owned by a Broward County collector. And they botched the investigation of a wealthy Doral real estate broker’s boat crash that killed a teenage girl.
That’s why people like Shadix have been calling for a sweeping reform of the agency’s leadership, so it can get back to doing the “conservation” part of its job. The FWC’s dirty DAVID dance sets the stage for her to sue to force the agency to change its ways, she told me.
How can anyone argue the agency doesn’t need reform, she said, “when they’re using the levers of government illegally for their own benefit to delve into the personal affairs of the people who oppose them?”
I know one person who would oppose reform: Barreto.
Handling the truth
I tried repeatedly this week to contact Barreto. The one question I wanted to ask him — one I got from Tom Cruise in “A Few Good Men” — was who ordered the employees to pull the records. Trust me, I could handle the truth.
But he did not respond to my phone calls and emails.
I contacted the FWC’s communications director, Shannon Knowles, who told me the Sentinel and Herald had “mischaracterized” what the FWC was doing. But so did Barreto, she said, because the agency doesn’t check up on its meeting speakers.
Instead, they apparently do a deep DAVID dive on ALL those bloodthirsty, gun-toting environmentalists.
“Claims that the FWC misuses or weaponizes its law enforcement authority are false,” she told me. “Threats concerning the harming of officers, staff and commissioners are taken seriously and is why it’s imperative that law enforcement works to ensure public safety by monitoring, preventing, and assessing potential security risks to maintain safe public spaces.”
I also sought comment from the man who appointed the wildlife commissioners, Gov. Ron DeSantis. But I never heard back from him or his spokespeople either.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that I knew this story was coming. About a month before the papers broke the news, Fannin told me of his suspicions. He was calling because I have occasionally said critical things about the FWC.
I’ve requested my own DAVID records. And dear reader, if you’ve ever said a single bad word about the FWC, you should do the same.
I know it’s a big bother to deal with this intrusive agency. But remember: Big Bother Is Watching You.
