And Your Little Dog, Too – Florida’s Digital Bill of Rights and the Expansion of the Biosecurity State

TALLAHASSEE, FL – Dorothy closed her eyes and clicked her heels. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” She repeats the desperate mantra until, finally, the protagonist of L. Frank Baum’s scathing populist allegory returns to the comforting placidness of her family’s farm in rural Kansas.

Echoes of the propagandistic device used in the Wizard of Oz are deafening over a hundred years later. The young, wide-eyed girl representing America’s “honest values” embarks on a nightmarish quest in her silver slippers to recover her innocence from the forces of evil – in that case, the evil of a gold-based monetary policy negatively affecting farmers at the turn of the century.

Trump’s Republican party rehashed the plot with the ubiquitous Make America Great Again (MAGA) campaign slogan, which has since come to define the politics of the conservative party’s largest demographic and key constituency. Nowhere has this nostalgic fairytale planted deeper roots than in Florida, where former Trump acolyte and state governor Ron DeSantis is having trouble leveraging the MAGA narrative.

Using the trite, xenophobic populism that characterizes MAGA politicians like DeSantis, the top culture warrior and “anti-woke” standard bearer has recently signed a piece of anti-immigrant legislation into law that is backfiring in spectacular fashion, as thousands of migrant laborers drop their work tools and leave for less repressive job markets in Georgia and other states.

Deserted construction sites and rotting tomatoes hanging from the vine in abandoned farmland has forced the bill’s most ardent supporters to beg immigrants not to leave. In a pathetic display of political incompetence, Republican Florida House member, Rick Roth was video recorded at an event sponsored by the Christian Family Coalition (CFC) of Florida shamelessly trying to redefine the intent of the law, qualifying it as performative rather than substantive.

Roth is joined by several other reactionary Florida conservatives trying to save face and the state’s economy through a fanciful reading of the law’s provisions, but their efforts are unlikely to bear fruit, no pun intended. Many migrant workers live with family members who are undocumented and thus risk being separated by the new law.

Buried in Section 5 of SB 1718 is a statute created to compel hospitals to collect migratory status data from patients using Medicaid and submit a quarterly report containing the “number of hospital admissions or emergency department visits […] which were made by a patient who indicated that he or she was a citizen of the United States or lawfully present in the United States, was not lawfully present in the United States, or declined to answer.”

More concerning is the DNA database to be collected by the “Domestic Security Oversight Council” created in Section 17 as an agency of Florida’s division of criminal justice. “Qualifying offenders” who become such “solely because of the issuance of an immigration detainer by a federal immigration agency” and regardless of whether they are booked at a county jail, correctional facility or juvenile detention center will be forced to provide DNA samples.

On Tuesday, June 6, DeSantis signed another bill into law which protects the state from any potential liability and constitutional encumbrances that may arise from these invasive data collection measures. The law is cloaked as a “Digital Bill of Rights” to appeal to the beloved freedom narratives of the “poorly educated” MAGA base, but a careful examination exposes it as yet another layer of the incipient biosecurity state.

Double Click Rules 

Hollywood replaced Dorothy’s silver shoes with the famous ruby red slippers most of us associate with the Wizard of Oz to strip the social commentary elements from the story. In the original tale, her silver footwear was a metaphor for the silver-backed currency that L. Frank Baum thought could be used by farmers to break the East coast bankers’ gold-standard.

It was these silver shoes that Dorothy ‘clicked’ to go back home. Today, we spend our lives clicking things on a keyboard or a screen that take us further and further from where we are. Social media and the preponderance of gamified virtual environments have resulted in an epidemic of dopamine addiction and growing alienation. Very real problems that are easily exploited by politicians and other interest groups.

DeSantis has pounced on one of the most sensitive issues surrounding the proliferation of these technologies to advance the agenda of the biosecurity state: Children. Tugging on parents’ heart strings and stoking their worst fears, Florida’s governor has been availing himself of the fear porn propagated on social media platforms to build his alleged case against big tech and to “protect the children” from Disney and other popular culture war conspiracies floating around in the zeitgeist.

Senate Bill 262 or the so-called “Digital Bill of Rights” starts off with a direct appeal to parents with a section geared towards the “protection of children in online spaces”, which empowers the government to bring legal action against any social media company or online service provider “on behalf of a Florida child” under the state’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. It does not, however, let private citizens do the same.

A disclaimer appears under each section of the law making it clear that these statutes do not “establish a private cause of action”, meaning that only the state prosecutor’s office can initiate any claims against the corporations, which furthermore will only affect companies making “in excess of $1 billion in global gross annual revenues”. This amendment was added after ‘small businesses’ complained that the bill would harm their ability to compete in the cut throat online advertising business. 

Added to this not-so-subtle weakening of the law are other requirements that a potential violator must meet before being at risk of a lawsuit. Non-profits, state agencies, “political subdivisions” of the state, financial institutions and, crucially, any private companies or businesses regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), are completely exempt from complying with the “Digital Bill of Rights”.

The number of specific exemptions are 21 and include health records, patient identification data, clinical research data, insurance information, consumer creditworthiness, employment records and many other data use cases in the airline, finance and industrial sectors. Of all the exemptions listed, nearly half are directly tied to healthcare and are governed by federal HHS laws.

Beyond the exemptions, the bill’s 53 pages are almost entirely comprised of loopholes that any “controller” or “processor” can use to escape or limit liability. Among the most salient is the ability to not only charge consumers for asserting their “digital rights”, but to “decline to act on the request” altogether if the company deems the request excessive or repetitive.

As for the “rights” themselves, these number only 7 and are all superficial in nature. They are also dependent on government intercession, since consumers cannot bring legal action independently and are bound by the level of compliance the state decides to enforce on the private corporations, as well as the mechanisms for relief the corporations themselves make available.

Florida “Digital Bill of Rights” provides that starting July 2024, consumers will be able to:

Confirm whether a company is using their personal data and obtain access to it

Correct inaccuracies in the data within certain parameters

Delete personal data provided by the consumer 

Obtain a copy of the data “to the extent technically feasible”

Opting out of targeted advertising, sale of personal data and profiling

Opting out of geolocation data collection and processing

Opting out voice and facial recognition data collection features

Right to Remain Silent

A more appropriate name for DeSantis’ law would be “Digital Bill of Rights for Corporations and State Entities”. Not only is the bulk of the document dedicated to the myriad ways in which private and public technology companies can (and will) avoid any meaningful limitations to the most profitable sector of the emerging data economy – health care – but, it continues to have the same fatal flaw of many of these so-called ‘digital rights’ initiatives. Namely, putting the onus on consumers to police their captors.

The sheer size of the digital marketplace makes this approach unworkable and fundamentally deceptive from a standpoint of any sincere effort to curb the ever-expanding surveillance state the world is now living in. Asking each individual to tailor their data collection permissions is asinine and simply encourages the perpetuation of the status quo.

DNA collection from undocumented immigrants by Florida law enforcement is protected by this bill. So is any identifiable data collected under the auspices of the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH), a global consortium of governmental and transnational regulatory agencies and the pharmaceutical industry.

It does not bar private companies, like ICH observer members Moderna, Pfizer or AstraZeneca, from using personal data to “conduct internal research to develop, improve, or repair products, services, or technology”. It has no recourse for those who do not wish to contribute to the bioinformatics revolution that wants to make the human body into just another ‘hackable’ device for the “next generation of healthcare and healthcare models“, as former Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer for the CDC, Brad Perkins, envisions.

These “digital rights” won’t even help if you happen to get sued by a company that holds your personal data, since none of the bill’s consumer protection statues apply if compliance violates “evidentiary privilege under the laws of” Florida. So much for Kansas, Dorothy.