A bear wanders through one of the pastures on the Olsen family cattle ranch in Davie. The natural beauty of Ben Olsen’s family property motivated him to become an environmental activist, which has led to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission putting him and his parents under surveillance.
Ben Olsen, a law firm employee whose family owns a ranch in Davie, said he discovered that the list of people the FWC had put under surveillance included his mother, then 67. “They did a search on me, my father, and my mother 50 times in one day,” Olsen said. “This is clearly a bigger issue than we thought. … They were going after a woman with dementia.”
At the time that the FWC decided her activities merited a criminal investigation, Olsen’s mother was living with Alzheimer’s disease. In her declining years, Sallie Olsen never left the house, much less showed up at FWC meetings to comment on environmental issues, Olsen said.
A documentary filmmaker named Brent Fannin had discovered that people who criticized the wildlife agency – many of them opponents of its anti-science bear hunt – had had their driving records pulled. The FWC’s declared reason for doing this? An ongoing criminal investigation that didn’t actually exist.
In July, the known number of critics the FWC had been keeping an eagle eye on totaled 16 – more than a dozen but fewer than a score. Fannin has continued digging into this and encouraging others to file their own public records requests. He told me last week that the number of souls the FWC snoops scrutinized had now climbed to 49.
The records were in the Driver and Vehicle Information Database, known as DAVID, the Miami Herald reported in July: “The system contains people’s driving records and other sensitive information like their Social Security numbers, medical disability records, addresses, signatures and emergency contacts.” The suspicion, the Orlando Sentinel reported then, is that the FWC used those DAVID records to trace its critics’ travel patterns. How? By employing the system of Flock cameras that dot our highways and read passing license plates. That way, the state agency could keep tabs on where their critics go and who they meet.
