Florida’s new HB 1471, signed by Governor DeSantis on April 6, works like this: the FDLE’s Chief of Domestic Security designates an organization as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The Governor and Cabinet approve by majority vote. A companion bill, HB 1473, exempts from public disclosure the information used to reach that designation.
The label then radiates outward. Membership with intent to further the organization’s activities is a second-degree felony. Material support is a felony. State agencies and school districts are barred from spending public funds on designated organizations. Universities must expel students and revoke fee waivers. The Department of State can administratively dissolve the corporation.
The executive picks a target. The executive controls the evidence and keeps it secret. The target cannot see or challenge the basis for the designation. And the consequences of the label are automatic and severe.
At the signing ceremony, Lt. Gov. Jay Collins explained:
We will designate, defund and dissolve people who don’t stand for our values. Material support, now a felony. To give money, guns or military training to those savages is a felony. Join them with intent to spill blood, also a felony.
Note the word people, not organizations. That’s intent. The bill is terrorism, while claiming to prevent it.
Familiarity
This is a familiar mechanism. The KKK operated through legal and administrative infrastructure: the designation of enemies, the control of local government machinery, the marshaling of law enforcement to persecute targeted groups under color of law.
The violence was the enforcement arm of an administrative project. The lynchings were capital punishment crowds, operating as law.
The operational logic in Florida is identical. A political executive identifies an enemy. The designation is made through a process the executive controls. The evidentiary basis is shielded from review. The consequences attach to the label, and the label attaches at the executive’s discretion. Anyone associated with the designated group faces criminal liability, financial ruin, and institutional expulsion.
Lynchings are the precedent.
The bill was allegedly written to first target one specific religion. DeSantis issued an executive order in December 2025 declaring two Islamic groups terrorist organizations. A federal judge blocked that order. The HB 1471 legislative end-run undermines courts: codify the power the court said the executive did not have.
The KKK doesn’t stop at one group. Nothing in the statute limits the designation to Islam, completely undermining the alleged purpose. Any organization that the Chief of Domestic Security secretly determines engages in “terroristic activity” and poses a threat to Florida qualifies. The definition of the threat, and the evidence supporting it, don’t have to be true and won’t be subject to reality.
Political Capture
The companion public records exemption is the obvious link to the white hoods. Without it, the designation could be challenged on its merits. With it, the executive controls both the accusation and the evidence where nobody can see. The designated organization’s only recourse is judicial review of a secret record compiled by the accuser.
This is what capture looks like in statute form. The mechanism that is supposed to resolve the question of whether an organization is dangerous has been absorbed into the apparatus of the executive making the accusation. The resolution mechanism and the power it is supposed to check are now the same entity. And so there’s no representation allowed at all.
The people bringing the cross to burn on a lawn are the people answering the 911 calls.
An Islamic group’s lead attorney identified the structure precisely:
This bill is not about safety or making anybody safer. It’s about giving the governor the power to use the word ‘terrorism’ as a label to politically wield it against anybody he doesn’t like.
The bill is in fact that.
Any critic of power can be labeled a terrorist by the governor’s office, using secret evidence, with felony consequences for association.
That is the KKK as a bill. It takes effect July 1.
A new Politico eulogy mourns the CIA World Factbook like a beloved teacher retiring.
On Feb. 4, the Trump administration abruptly shuttered this widely accepted account of humanity and its flags, nations, customs, militaries and borders. […] A great wave of grief rose from Factbook fans. Many said they mourned an America that valued knowledge for its own sake. Some saw darker forces at work under a president whose administration has promoted — in times of war and peace — “alternative facts.” “Stay curious,” the CIA advised in its “fond farewell” to the Factbook.
I have thoughts.
The coverage, like most coverage of this story, gets the history wrong in ways that matter.
The Factbook was an intelligence product, and understanding why it was created, why it was made public, and why it was shut down requires distinguishing between three different CIA eras that the press keeps unintelligently collapsing into one.
A Tale of Three Eras
The first CIA was unmistakably “Wild Bill” Donovan’s. In 1943, Donovan built the Joint Army Navy Intelligence Studies program because Pearl Harbor had exposed a catastrophic gap: the United States had no coordinated system for knowing what was happening in the world. When the National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA, it inherited that mission. Basic intelligence. Know the world so you can act in it.
Donovan’s vision was a knowledge agency that served the republic. He basically said prevent America First from ever rising again.
The second CIA was Allen Dulles’s. And Dulles was not a good leader. By the mid-1950s, the agency had become something Donovan’s original architecture was never designed to house. Guatemala 1954. Iran 1953. Bay of Pigs 1961. The Phoenix Program. MKULTRA. Domestic surveillance of American citizens. The agency created to stop America First and prevent another Pearl Harbor was running coups, assassinating foreign leaders, and dosing unwitting subjects with LSD. This was the CIA of the dumb decades, and it had almost nothing in common with the coordinating body Congress stood up in 1947.
The third CIA was the one that emerged from the necessary Church Committee hearings in 1975. Senator Frank Church’s investigation exposed the pathological “Family Jewels,” the agency’s own internal catalog of illegal operations.
At THIS junction, the CIA needed rehabilitation. It needed to demonstrate that it still served the public. The Factbook, which had existed as a classified product since 1962 and been declassified in 1971, was released to the public that same year. The timing was the message. The agency was saying: we are still Donovan’s knowledge shop. We still do basic intelligence. We still serve the republic.
It was a rejection of Nixon.
The Politico article traces the Factbook’s origin to the CIA’s founding in 1947, then jumps to 1971.
Nope.
That leap skips the entire institutional history that explains why the Factbook went public in the first place. You cannot understand the 1975 publication without understanding what the agency did between 1947 and 1975 that made a public rehabilitation necessary. “There was never confirmation that the bad press inspired the wide release,” the AP writes.
Do we need confirmation that water is wet?
The Factbook was the CIA’s move back to Donovan days of 1947. To the knowledge mission. Because that’s useful.
Early Internet Infrastructure
It also became something more. Being included in the Factbook could confer legitimacy upon a nation or an opposition party. That line is buried in the Politico piece like it is incidental. It is the entire point. The CIA decided what counted as a country. What its borders were. Who governed it. Which entities were sovereign, which were dependencies, which were disputed. Every student, journalist, policymaker, and Model UN delegate who reached for it accepted CIA-curated categories as the baseline description of the world.
That is an essential agency function. The Factbook did not merely describe reality. It organized reality into categories that shaped how millions of people understood it. The intelligence operation was the publication. You did not need to hide it when the product itself was the instrument of influence.
Face the Facts
Facebook (2004) copies this architecture with precision. A “book” of “facts” about the world becomes a “book” of “faces” about people. Free to users. Positioned as neutral infrastructure. Becomes the default reference that everyone from individuals to institutions to governments relies on.
The Factbook defined countries. Facebook defines identity (real name policy), relationships (social graph), events (News Feed), and truth (content moderation, fact-checking partnerships). The same operation at a different scale: make a population legible, categorizable, targetable. Call it a public service.
The CIA called its product “basic intelligence.” Facebook calls its product “connecting people.” Both are euphemisms for making populations legible to power.
Thiel as Bridge
Peter Thiel was Facebook’s first outside investor. The year was 2004. The same year he co-founded Palantir, which received its seed funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. Palantir’s software was built through iterative collaboration between Palantir engineers and intelligence agency analysts over nearly three years.
Two products launched in the same year by the same investor. One consumer-facing “factbook” about people. One intelligence-facing “seeing stone” about targets. One collects. The other operationalizes.
1968 Again
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the agency needs to refocus on its “core mission.” That is an explicit statement that the public knowledge function was never the real mission. The covert operations were.
Closing the Factbook is the CIA officially abandoning Donovan’s 1947 vision and embracing the second CIA, the one the Church Committee tried to reform. It’s the thing Donovan warned against.
Nixon shut out the public and weaponized intelligence against domestic enemies. Trump shuts down the public-facing product entirely and hands the knowledge function to private infrastructure his allies built with CIA seed money. The pattern is simple. The mechanism boring.
The Business Model
The Factbook shutdown fits a pattern so consistent it qualifies as policy. Trump’s March 2025 executive order dismantled the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the only federal agency that funds libraries. His 2026 budget eliminates it entirely. The National Park Service lost 24 percent of its workforce in the first half of 2025. The proposed budget cuts public lands agency funding by more than a third. Interior Secretary Burgum told Congress that if his department were a private company, it would have the “largest balance sheet in the world.”
Libraries. Parks. Public lands. The CDC website. Smithsonian exhibits. The Factbook. Every free public resource built with taxpayer money, shut down, gutted, or stripped for parts. The money that funded these things does not come back. It disappears into a government that returns less and less while collecting the same.
Fifty-two days after the CIA killed the Factbook, a Dubai-based startup launched worldfactbook.io with “AI-powered intelligence” and a developer API. Free for now. That is a customer acquisition strategy. The playbook is familiar: defund the public version, wait for the private replacement, let the market set the price for what taxpayers already paid to build.
Burgum looks at 500 million acres of public land and sees a balance sheet. Thiel looks at 3 billion Facebook users and sees a dataset. The Factbook told everyone how the world worked, for free, for sixty years. The replacement will do the same thing, for a fee, with your data as the payment.
What Wild Bill Would Say
Donovan warned in 1945 (August 25, 1945 paper to Truman, “Principles Which Should Govern the Establishment of a Centralized United States Foreign Intelligence System“):
The formulation of national policy both in its political and military aspects is influenced and determined by knowledge (or ignorance) of the aims, capabilities, intentions and policies of other nations.
Knowledge or ignorance. Donovan built the architecture because he understood that a country that does not know the world cannot act in it. Eighty years later, the government he served is choosing ignorance on purpose. Shutting down the Factbook. Defunding libraries. Selling parks. Stripping public data from federal websites. Every free source of knowledge, systematically eliminated.
Donovan’s statue still stands in the lobby at Langley. The Factbook he inspired is gone. The “basic intelligence” it contained now lives on servers in Dubai and Menlo Park, managed by people who answer to shareholders, not citizens.
The Substack migration that Nate Silver is celebrating today is worth scrutiny.
Moving from a captured public square to private subscription newsletters doesn’t restore information integrity. It privatizes it. The people who can afford $200/year subscriptions get Silver’s shiny analysis. Everyone else gets Catturd. That’s stratification, the opposite of a correction. Does he need the money more than the moral fiber?
Framing social media algorithms as a neutral ecological observation, rather than as decisions made by identifiable people for identifiable reasons, is wrong. Musk is a Nazi who bought Twitter to control a resolution mechanism. He literally rebranded with a swastika. The engagement metrics Silver analyzes so carefully are channel output after capture, like listening to dictator radio after a coup. The question isn’t what thrives, it’s who committed the coup, and why.
The most revealing data is the one that Silver surfs right past. The New York Times has 53 million followers and gets a few hundred engagements on breaking news. That’s suppression far more than a decline. A platform owner decided institutional journalism would be punished and partisan entertainment rewarded. The “ecosystem” was engineered. It’s opposite to evolution, like someone wanted digital dodo birds to inhabit their private island.
Silver actually describes the ecology of platform incentives without ever naming what he’s documenting:
Data science of information warfare.
Every observation he makes is a warfare concept dressed in media-business language.
The algorithmic boost Musk built for himself is command authority over the information battlespace.
Suppressing external links is severing supply lines.
The “island effect” producing Catturd and Gavin Newsom Press Office as dominant species is what happens when you degrade the information environment until only propagandists can thrive. That’s motivated terrain shaping.
None of it is accidental. Historians are trained to recognize what’s going on. Warfare is the word he’s reaching for, while he flees his house of straw for a brick one and charges $200 at the door for protection.
Trump said “I don’t need international law.” Hegseth calls rules of engagement “stupid.”
The new letter signed by over 100 experts acknowledges these quotes and then proceeds as if restating the rules of war louder will matter. I’m reminded of the early warnings of Haile Selassie about Mussolini, which obviously went unheeded. The whole thing is an appeal to a framework that fascist leaders explicitly repudiate.
Selassie’s 1936 League of Nations address is an exact historical parallel: a direct appeal to an international body that had already demonstrated it would not act. The outcome was catastrophic. We know, right? Mussolini showed us what’s next, right?
Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Abyssinia (modern day Ethiopia) with Brigadier Daniel Arthur Sandford on his left and Colonel Orde Wingate on his right, in Dambacha Fort after it had been captured, 15 April 1941
Let me put it in simpler context. The letter correctly lists violations. But who acts? The ICC? Trump targeted and sanctioned ICC officials to prevent this. The Security Council? Trump doesn’t believe in the UN but he is set up with a veto. The letter’s final section vaguely invokes Common Article 1 obligations on allies but never names a single ally, a single concrete action, a single consequence. “We urge”? That is not enforcement.
And there’s a gap in the analysis. Iran’s internet shutdown, Israel’s broadcast ban, Gulf states arresting citizens, FCC threatening US broadcasters. That’s the “Nixonian” operational reality this letter completely ignores. How does anyone enforce a law if they can’t document violations? Trump recently installed two Nixonian operatives to poison and destroy official communications.
It’s interesting that Congress is never mentioned in the letter. Wouldn’t domestic power be the usual answer to stop a democratic leader? The War Powers Resolution is never mentioned. Federal courts are never mentioned. If Trump openly says international law is a dead letter to the executive, the only remaining check is domestic. Yet the letter doesn’t touch it. To me this suggests loss of faith in American checks and balances, post-democracy, and thus it’s an appeal to the world for rescue.
However, the letter doesn’t rise to international enforcement because it seems overly focused on a tone problem. Trump asserts that the US president is above international law as a matter of constitutional authority. The letter says Trump’s statements are “alarming rhetoric” and “disrespect for norms.” But it isn’t just rhetoric. His words are chaotic, self-contradictory and random at best. They deserve little focus. His actions are the many crimes.
What’s really been happening is the systematic elimination of domestic enforcement of international law obligations. The only people inside the US government who could have flagged violations in real time all have been fired. That’s not a small consideration. That’s the whole ballgame. And yet the letter says it has “concerns about institutional safeguards”: removing JAGs, abolishing civilian protection teams, and gutting the law of war manual references from the NDS. Without those, what’s left? Game over.
And that brings us back to the historical perspective completely absent from the letter. When a powerful militant state openly declares itself unbound, and no one enforces, the bad behavior accelerates. The letter fails to state what they see happening when their appeal fails. It already has, as Selassie would say.
The real question, which the letter should have started with, is which allies are complicit and what domestic institutions have abdicated? Or to put it more clearly, now that all the guardrails are behind us, what prevents the world from repeating what comes next? The institution getting all the funding is the one committing the violations.
Trump told guests. “We can’t take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military….”
Source: Axios
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
