A (3:37)

Here's the hard truth, and you hear it from me all the time. Federal agencies aren't cutting it. And I worked for the federal government for 16 years. I think it's okay to say when something is not getting done and that's the case we're in. But if someone's not doing it, someone has to do it. So why not take responsibility on the state level and then, you know, it's handled. That's an important piece. I think a lot of people forget because we always hear excuses. So many excuses, very few solutions. Because guess what? Solutions are hard. They cost money. They take smart people. They're political risks. Right? For our politicians to stick their neck out and do something different. And all the time we hear excuses. That's the Fed's job, that's FBI's responsibility. They're all over it. Oh, no, that falls under the dhs. They've got it, right? See something, say something. They've got it. Actually, I want to bring something up about that. So about 13 months ago, I was briefing individuals on my state's level and I was saying, hey, I went to DHS to see something, say something for a terrorism threat tip, and it did not give me the right information. So I was looking at who, if I was a local citizen, would I reach out to to provide a terrorism tip and I'm actually going to do it. I mentioned this like 13 months ago. So, hey, maybe the DHS fixed this and if they did, we'll applaud them. But if they didn't, they're going to be in a Lot of trouble, but let's do it anyway. So we go to Google, we'll type terrorism tip to dhs, because this is what a normal person would do. Okay, so then, oh, first thing that comes up is see something, say something. So that's working, right? Okay, so we go to the page. You have to go down kind of the middle, report a tip. Okay, we're getting closer. So now this is nice. They actually give you a whole map. Okay, so let's click it. I live in Florida, and actually in my state, there's three sectors, so I can actually pick Tampa. So I'm gonna pick Tampa. And, oh, they have not updated. So this is telling me, the DHS's website, that if I have a terrorism tip that I call the city of Tampa's Office of Emergency Management. This is the office in Tampa that literally handles hurricanes. Can you imagine if I call them up and say, hey, I was at the recent Mardi Gras and I saw this strange surveillance where people weren't filming the parade. They seemed to be filming where the police checkpoints were. I'm very concerned. I really think this is terrorist activity. If I gave that to the hurricane people, what do you think they would do with it? It? This is a huge, constant problem because there isn't actually, like, the perfect place to go to. But, boy, if our state sets up the system and offers this to us, we're in a much better situation. I had another situation last year where I called the sheriff's department. It wasn't in Florida to report a terrorism tip. And I was literally told by the sheriff's department, they do not take terrorism tips over the phone. And I said, well, what if I was a foreigner? What if I was calling you from, like, the tribal areas in Pakistan, and this is my one chance to make a quick call and give you a tip like it was a. No, I'm not going to say where it was because I'm now friends with the sheriff. And I can promise you you can call 247 and give them a terrorism tip. But why do we have to keep finding these problems to fix? Like, we're just ordinary citizens? I don't work for the state. I don't work for the federal government anymore. But look, here's a problem. Problem I pointed out 13 months ago, and it has yet to be corrected. So I hope Tampa Bay Emergency Management Office is really handling their terrorism tips correctly. It's a very, very frustrating thing. So when we have problems, be it counterterrorism, be it counterintelligence, it doesn't matter. Right? We have enemies. I don't care if the enemy is a. I don't care if the enemy is China. What I do care is that you treat them with the appropriate measure of response these threats deserve. You have someone working it, and if something emerges locally, we don't have to worry that it went into some federal gap and it's sitting in an inbox. How many times have we heard after the fact from the FBI that a person was on their radar? Well, that doesn't help us when we have 40 dead citizens in our community. Right. So it's time to take some ownership of this. And I am happy to see Florida doing this. And we have seen other states at least talk about, like, how can we get a better head of this? Because remember, when it happens here, this is our problem. Any immediate problem is our problem. By the time the feds get around to doing anything, it takes forever. Think about it. Just for hurricane response. If a hurricane hits here today, the person knocking on my door tomorrow in my flooded house to make sure I got out safely when I'm hiding on the second floor is not FEMA. FEMA's going to show up in what, six weeks. They'll process my paperwork in three months. That is not the kind of response we need to these massive threats we're facing. So we. When we talk about stuff like this, there isn't just like these pie in the sky, oh, maybe we're going to have threats. First off, just here in Florida, we had Al Qaeda facilitator networks that were operating through the 2000s. They were moving money, coordinating travel. They were attempting recruitment right here. Activities that were visible locally. But the early warning signs were all missed because just a small piece would go up to the FBI. Small piece would go up to FBI. No one on the state level was putting everything together. And I think after we here in Florida learned that Shamsuddin Jober, right, the New Orleans attacker cased Tampa and chose New Orleans. You know, it's got a lot of people asking questions. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Does the community even understand that the city and the Riverwalk have been cased by isis? What are you doing about it, Tampa? What are you doing about the state of Florida? We don't actually have a body that you can go ask in the state and say, what have you done proactively since learning this happened because he came in, what was it, October 2024. He was here for a few days and knocked it all out. Well, I have so many questions about that, and I Work terrorism every day. We all care about our communities and we want law enforcement to be working this. Local threats, because that is a local threat. That's not just saying, oh, ISIS is interested in Florida. We have casing occurring in this country. And that's not the only casing incident. We've had casing in 2025 in Florida. Right. FBI is offering nothing to the citizens of Florida to get ready. So, yeah, I do think it falls on the state and I am excited to see the state lean in. Now, other examples, the Boston Marathon is a really great example from 2013. So local law enforcement did notice suspicious activity in Watertown before the federal government put all the pieces together. Right. A proactive state level analytic capability could have moved things along a lot faster. San Bernardino in 2015, another great example. That was when the married couple unfortunately went in and did a terrorist attack on their own workplace during a holiday party. There was multiple pieces of information that might have gave an early detection warning at a local level. You weren't going to get it from the feds. The other honest thing is the federal government can't do this like we need to do this. States have the capability to detect, disrupt and neutralize these threats as long as you enable them. Right. We have plenty of people in this state with the training, the capability, all this can be taught to do it. Well, I want to walk through a little bit of this so you understand, first off is when we talk about putting this unit together, what it looks like is the concept is let's give the state their own eyes and their own ears and their own analytic capability. And we're really going to have officers who work intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism. They're going to focus on things like international and domestic threats, insider threats, corporate threats, foreign adversaries targeting our state and institutions in our state. Now, these teams can act independently if they need to. They can be in coordination with other state agencies, with their federal partners. So think about it. If we're just talking about the Port of Jacksonville, it's a critical logistics hub. Well, terrorists could be interested in targeting it, but transnational criminal networks could also use it to move in drugs. China could be using it to move in people illegally. Right. There are so many different threat vectors. That's at one port. Think of how many ports we have in the state. The other thing is we have so many universities and research facilities, and for a long time, especially China has been targeting them, pulling information out of them, stealing data, stealing research. But we don't have anybody in the state that focuses on it to actually even understand the damage or to prevent it from happening. It's just like, come in, steal all of our research, please bring it back to our adversaries. Not nobody wants that. We also have issues. We have a ton of military bases in this state. Sure, the military cares about what's happening on the other side of the gate, but what about five miles out from the base? What about 10 miles out from the base? Who is looking at counterintelligence and counterterrorism threats to some of these extremely valuable institutions, not just for national security, but these bases are some of our cities, national economies. Right. That is where the majority of people work in some cities. So we want to keep these things safe, you know, protected. Right. Florida can never be a soft target. And having something like this in place really does make the enemy think twice. In the perfect world, we want states to be proactive, not reactive. And unfortunately, when something bad happens, most of the work is done after the fact. But why does it have to be that way? Why can we just not actually finally try a different model and do things better? And that's what at least Florida is trying to do. And I think other states should take advantage of this. Now, I want to kind of talk through what you could do if you implemented a capability like this. First off, you can do pattern mapping across jurisdictions. Now, this can help you connect the dots. Who's traveling, who's doing purchases, who's doing partnerships, different radicalization that's occurring in the communities. But also it can answer questions that I have heard from most law enforcement as I've traveled around the country. Right. Hey, we're seeing illicit money moved through things like vape shops, right? Is that connected to terrorism? We're seeing it connected to Yemen. Are transnational criminal networks doing this? There are so many questions and very little answers because the state's not dealing with every concern as a whole in analyzing it. Well, guess what? Now you can hopefully come up with a solution to that. Another thing is a persistent counterintelligence focus. It's really rare to hear about that on the state level when we are constantly targeted by adversaries. On the state level, they don't just look at the United States and say, we're just going to go after D.C. they're going to look at the states with the best economies, with the space program, you know, which, with huge support and access to the military, with tourism bringing in lots of money. How do we impact those places? I mean, Florida has all of these problems and there's nobody countering that piece. We almost forget to counter that piece. We think of more of an attack, but we don't think of influence by the adversary and all the different things they do. That is quiet, but it's preparation for future war planning. Another thing is we could really have a functioning integrated liaison architecture. A lot of people heard me complain about this, and it's good to see Odni, Tulsi, Gabbard at least coming up with solutions. But again, the National Counterterrorism center put out a memoir that talked about Al Qaeda's intent to attack the US Homeland. They wrote it unclassified for law enforcement, and then at the state level, it was not disseminated in a large number of locations to local law enforcement. That is a problem. So of course, Tulsi is like, okay, we're going to create an app. Law enforcement can come and see all of our products. But what if we want to go the other way? Or what if we want to share among ourselves? State now has to realize, hey, this is a problem. Information sharing is a problem. We are not getting the intelligence we need when we need it. I mean, this is the most important hurdle to preventing any kind of threats or even just a crisis from getting out of control. Right? Accurate and timely information sharing. Another thing is we can have informed analysts who understand the adversary. They understand patterns, they know what is going on in other locations. When we talk about things like critical infrastructure, we have ports, the power company, there's so many things, just biotech innovation hubs all over the state. State. Now if you have analysts who can go in there and are experts on the state level and seeing like, here's the threats we're seeing, you can be more proactive in your mitigation. I mean, this is a help to every single person. The last piece of this is you really get some institutional memory. We have threats to this state, just like your state has threats to it. Now, it does not matter if your governor is Republican or he's a Democrat, your state still going to have pretty much the same number of threats. So why would you not have a body that no matter who's in charge and who's leading and who got elected for two or four years, you still have institutional knowledge that passes on. And you have this expertise in two of the biggest threat vectors, right? Counterintelligence and counterterrorism. I mean, it's almost like when you look at something like this, it's like, why did this not happen earlier? Like, who influenced this from being something that we already did on the state level because we're way behind. This is something that should have been happening for decades. Now when we talk about counterterrorism integration, it's interesting because I made a lot of points from the analysis side of things. But I want you to also understand this is also going to be an operational capability. So we're going to have teams that really can arrest and thwart terrorists on the local level and charge them. You know, we're going to have our own coordination. So intelligence goes straight to law enforcement. You know, we don't have to go through all these middlemen. We don't have to hear like, oh, I can't share that with you. You know, I got it from jttf, but I can't pass it down. Like what another thing is, we'll have more localized insight. A team that comes in to investigate something from the federal level for four days knows nothing about what's happening on the ground compared to the guy who's been sitting in his job for 15 years. Right. And we have to be honest about that. We have insane levels of institutional knowledge in this country. Not just for people being in the positions for a long time. But you know, Florida recruits some of the biggest, best law enforcement in the world. Heck, people retire, then they come down here and then they go back into law enforcement in Florida. So we're lucky that we have this base of knowledge. Why are we not taking advantage of it? Why are we just sitting back and being like, oh, I hope the fed send me some threat reporting. Oh, I hope FBI stops this plot. Well, guess what guys, none of that's happening. Okay? Even the terrorists are surprised that FBI has captured pretty much none of them in the last several years. Even with all the hoopla around the fact, oh, we know there's thousands here. Well, thousands aren't being detained and those thousands are in your communities and those thousands are in your states. And now this is a state level responsibility. So Florida, and if you go look at the bill, you can just use this as a template. So let's say you're Texas. You can focus on things like the cross border smuggling hybrid threats that are occurring along the Rio Grande. Hey, I know there's not just narcos there because terrorists have come in through Texas. Another thing, Pennsylvania, you have the energy infrastructure you care about. You have industrial supply chains. Wow, really great topics to have a body that focuses on counterintelligence. In California, we have massive tech innovation centers. We also have the LA Long beach port. Again, really great areas On a state level, who could benefit from this type of expertise and this type of program. You know, in Montana and Tennessee, we have other research hubs, rural supply chains, you know, federal facilities. So many states can benefit if they start thinking through this model and how they could take advantage of it. Here's the way I look at it. States have to stop waiting for the federal government to act. They need to take ownership at the local level, and we're gonna save lives if we do this. And that is one of the most important things. But I also just want to protect our state from a number of things, you know, from any adversary trying to target us. So this bill gives Florida the capability to see threats early, to connect the dots across counties, to coordinate still with federal and local partners, and to act before an attack or any kind of threat vector may emerge. The other thing is, it's just getting the idea out into our communities what is a threat, because I can tell you there's a number of companies who don't look at China in the way they should. I don't know if you remember years ago, it was like. I think it was Mark Zuckerberg, and he was in front of Congress, and they said, hey, is China targeting you? And he said, well, you know, it'd be foolish to say they're not targeting me, but there were other organizations that went up at the same time, and they literally said, no. It's like, come on, China's been stealing from all you guys for years. What do you mean? It's. No, no, it's scary when you have no understanding of the threat environment. And, hey, we're just saying, let's get more proactive. Let's take our own ownership. Let's not sit around and wait for someone else to tell us what's in our own backyard, you know, and let's protect our own people. So hopefully, you know, Florida moves forward on a path like this, and then now that this has gotten out there, you know, other states can start looking at models like this and see, hey, how can we make this work for us? How can this benefit us? While we do have massive gaps when it comes to counterintelligence and counterterrorism, you know, we do need to find solutions. You know, no one's gonna forgive you after the fact. You look incredibly incompetent when China steals from your university for 10 years. Right? Like, why are we putting ourselves in this situation? It should not be this way. So someone has to own it. Why not the state? Why not now? Thanks for tuning into the watch floor.