Broward’s Sheriff runs a nine-figure, six-thousand-person office and the power to ruin your whole day, your whole year, and possibly your whole decade. The trust of every institution below him is dwindling. The Instagram is not.

Being Sheriff of Instagram must have one hell of a pull.

A day does not go by without another episode of Sweatin’ With R. Lee Ermey. Planks. Guns. Range photos. Guns. Scott air tanks. More guns. Did we mention guns? The man wants you to watch him work out. He needs you to. That is not strength. That is an ad for Planet Fitness. You advertise the things that do not sell on their own.

All that’s missing is the wah-wah guitar and a house band.

Arnold never had to tell you he was Arnold. Hans and Franz had to pump you up because they couldn’t pump themselves. Tony keeps showing you how strong he is. Keeps filming it. Keeps performing. Either he isn’t afraid you’ll figure it out, or he’s betting you won’t.

When eight of ten posts are workout videos, a person starts to wonder. I wonder, is a taxpayer sponsored Only Fans page on the horizon?

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Here is what he cannot lift his way out of. None of it counts where it matters. He can deadlift the building. Florida’s Sunshine Law will not spot him a pound. He can mow down every paper target in the range, and Chapter 119 does not give a damn. That body, built for a Suzanne Somers infomercial, ran straight into a form that has no eyes. And into me.

I would say I outfoxed him, but with that GPA, roughly 50 points south of the Mendoza line (look it up), it is not much of a fox to out.

The problem is not the physique. It is the position. The clock is loud and melting like a Dali, so Tony keeps cashing the one asset that still photographs well, because the others are starting to bounce.

Check the paper.

Budget request denied. DOGE came, DOGE went, and DOGE is coming back with an appetite. Nothing to see here, he says. Pay no attention to the training center sold cheap and built dear. For his dear, used by his dear, and also, thousands of “guest guests.” Pay no attention to the money that was supposed to be raises and somehow found the brand. Every time someone pulls the record, the man comes up lighter than the ad.

So he flexes. He flexes hardest where the paper is thinnest.

Some men flex because they’re strong. Some men flex because it’s the only room in the house with the lights on. I’m not saying which one this is. I’m saying he’s the one who keeps turning the lights on for us.

I don’t have to guess what he’s compensating for. I point at what he does in public. He flexes. I file. One of those holds up when a stranger checks it.

Florida DOGE does not care about his plank time. Neither does Chapter 119. If this keeps up, the state is going to punt him clean into the 305.

The louder a man performs strength, the more he tells you where he’s soft. This one has been very loud.

Press play. Tick.

— T. Chaz Stevens

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

Sergeant Chelsea Rivera, Division of Internal Affairs, mailed me a letter dated August 28. It landed September 2. Seems I have been identified as a witness in an administrative case, so I have until September 8 to provide a sworn, recorded statement. That is three business days and a federal holiday from today.

Missing in action from her letter: case number, allegation, subject, and complainant. I got a blank form with my name on it.

Here is what it is about.

Sheriff Tony has his Hooters-orange Dolfin boy shorts in a wad, because somebody had the audacity to photograph our taxpayer-owned truck, outfitted with taxpayer truck upgrades, sitting on a taxpayer-paved parking lot. Picture in hand, I published it.

The boy shorts are now wadded, hilarity ensues, and one poor Sergeant is sent packing.

Back to Rivera’s letter. I answered it the way I answer every records custodian who sends me a form.

Do not be lazy.
Fill in the blanks.

For the record I also cited the two statutory dates that start the clocks in sections 112.532(6)(a) and 112.533(5)(b), Florida Statutes, and told her the burden is on BSO to meet the three-part test in section 90.5015(2) before I say one word about a source. In the letter I put it in the language a court reads. Here I will put it plainly: fuck off about my sources.

That letter is the record. It is below, verbatim. Rivera also wants it sworn. Fine. Below the letter is a statement. Every printable word is true and I will affirm it under penalty of perjury.

The Letter to Sergeant Rivera, September 3, 2026

VIA EMAIL

Sergeant Chelsea Rivera
Division of Internal Affairs
Broward Sheriff’s Office
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33312
CC: Terrance Lynch

Re: Your letter dated August 28, 2026, styled “Internal Affairs Investigation”

Sergeant Rivera:

Your letter dated August 28, 2026 arrived by U.S. Mail on September 2, 2026. It requests a sworn, recorded statement and sets a response date of September 8, 2026. Measured from the date of receipt, that period contains three business days and the Labor Day holiday. This letter is my response within that period.

Your letter identifies me as a witness in an administrative case. It does not state a case number. It does not identify the allegation, the member under investigation, the complainant, or the policy or statute at issue. It does not state who identified me as a witness, or on what basis. I will not provide a sworn statement on a subject the agency has not disclosed to me.

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Before I will schedule any statement, please provide the following in writing:

1. The Internal Affairs case number.

2. The allegation under investigation, and the specific policy, rule, general order, or statute alleged to have been violated.

3. The name, rank, and CCN of each member who is the subject of the case.

4. The identity of the complainant of record; whether the matter reached the agency by referral from any other agency, and if so, the referring agency and the date of referral; and whether the agency treats me as the complainant or as a witness.

5. The date on which the agency received notice of the allegation, for purposes of section 112.532(6)(a), Florida Statutes, and the date the complaint was filed with the agency, for purposes of section 112.533(5)(b), Florida Statutes.

6. The statutory provision your letter describes as governing the time to complete the investigation. I read the reference to be section 112.532(6)(a), Florida Statutes. Please confirm or correct.

7. The subjects you intend to cover in the requested statement, and each document you intend to place before me during it.

The following items go to the specific matter I understand to be at issue. On or about August 2026, the agency placed a sworn member on administrative leave in connection with a photograph of a taxpayer owned and heavily upgraded vehicle parked on Broward Sheriff’s Office property. The photograph was posted to a Broward Sheriff’s Office internal group and was thereafter published, with my reporting, in the general press. If this is the matter in which I have been identified as a witness, please confirm or correct the following:

8. Whether the case under investigation concerns the disclosure, posting, or transmission of a photograph of a vehicle taken on agency property, rather than any conduct of mine.

9. Whether the agency contends that my published reporting, or my receipt of any photograph, is within the scope of the statement it seeks from me.

10. Whether the agency has interviewed, or intends to interview me regarding, the source or chain of custody of any photograph, image, or record referenced in my published reporting.

11. Whether any member has been placed on administrative leave, reassigned, or subjected to any personnel action in connection with this matter, and if so, the date of that action.

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I am a long-standing and well-regarded professional journalist. My published reporting speaks for itself and requires no statement from me. I will not answer any question that seeks, directly or indirectly, the identity of a source or any unpublished newsgathering material. Section 90.5015, Florida Statutes.

Subject to the foregoing, I will provide a truthful sworn statement limited to the subjects identified in your written response to the items above, on the following terms:

(a) The statement will take one of two forms, at my election after I receive your response: a written declaration under section 92.525, Florida Statutes, with exhibits, answering written questions submitted by the agency; or a recorded interview limited to the identified subjects.

(b) Any recorded interview will be recorded by both parties. A representative of my choosing may attend. I will receive a copy of the recording and any transcript when the case ceases to be active under section 112.533(5), Florida Statutes.

(c) Any recorded interview will be made immediately available to my readership. I do not operate in a cone of silence.

(d) I am adverse to the Broward Sheriff’s Office in pending matters, including pre-suit notices under section 119.12, Florida Statutes, on Request Nos.; a pre-suit notice concerning the unlicensed use of copyrighted music; and Florida Commission on Ethics Complaint No. 26-174, In re GREGORY TONY. Questions touching those matters are outside the scope of a witness statement. No statement I give waives any claim, position, or privilege in those matters or in any other.

(e) Nothing in this letter or in any statement is an agreement to confidentiality beyond what the law imposes.

(f) I will categorically follow the letter of the law, both in spirit and intent.

Your letter does not cite section 112.533(7), Florida Statutes. If the agency contends that provision applies to me, please state so in writing. I note Cooper v. Dillon, 403 F.3d 1208 (11th Cir. 2005).

Please preserve all records of this case, including intake and assignment records, the record identifying me as a witness, the computation of the periods under sections 112.532(6)(a) and 112.533(5)(b), Florida Statutes, the mailing record for your August 28, 2026 letter, and all communications concerning the case with the Office of the Sheriff, command staff, and the Office of the General Counsel, pending the conclusion of this case and any proceeding under Chapter 119, Florida Statutes.

I am not aware of any statute that sets a ten-day period for a witness to respond to an agency’s request for a statement. If one applies, please cite it. I will schedule a statement within twenty-one (21) days after I receive the information requested above.

Please respond in writing to the email and postal addresses below.

This letter is sent without prejudice to any right or remedy, all of which are expressly reserved.

Sincerely,

T. Chaz Stevens, Pro Se Witness

cc: Terrence Lynch, General Counsel, Broward Sheriff’s Office

Sworn Statement of T. Chaz Stevens

STATE OF FLORIDA
COUNTY OF BROWARD

BEFORE ME, the undersigned, personally appeared T. Chaz Stevens, who being first duly sworn and thoroughly unimpressed, deposes and says:

1. My name is T. Chaz Stevens. I am well over the age of eighteen and of somewhat sound mind, which is more than I can swear to about the outfit that mailed me this letter.

2. I graduated from Florida Tech with a 3.7 in Applied Mathematics. The Sheriff, per the record, finished barber school with a 1.47. I did not know you could graduate with that. I stand corrected, and a little concerned.

3. I received Rivera’s letter on September 2. It gave me until September 8. They’ve been fucking around for months, and I get 72 hours, plus a Federal holiday?

4. The Broward Sheriff’s Office could not, if pressed, locate its own ass with both hands and a flashlight.

5. A photograph of a truck parked in a lot is not a state secret. It is a truck. In a lot. Anyone with eyes and a phone committed the same felony the sky commits every time it rains on that parking space. Amirite, Comrade?

6. That is not the Sheriff’s truck. That is the taxpayer’s truck. Please ask him not to ding it, and go easy on the ball sweat funkifying the Corinthian leather seats.

7. I published the photograph because publishing photographs is the job. I will do it again. I would do it right now if another one showed up. One is showing up as we speak. I can feel it.

8. Speaking of which and on a wholly unrelated matter, I remain in the market for a photograph of a certain civilian at a certain gym. Strictly journalistic. Should one arrive, I would of course have no earthly idea where it came from.

9. Speaking of things that arrive: the agency found the time to put a man on leave over a photo of a truck. The agency cannot find the time to answer a records request without invoicing me eight hundred goddamn dollars.

10. I will give a truthful statement the day the agency tells me what the statement is about. Until then the answer to every unasked question is fuck off. Or, where is the supervisor. I’m just traveling. Can I score some of that six-figure jail overtime. Does the Sheriff actually work, or just do planks.

11. I will not tell you where the photograph came from. Not for a subpoena, not for a sworn statement, not for a fruit basket. Section 90.5015, Florida Statutes, and a spine. You can, in my Mom’s eternal words, and god rest her soul down in Hell, you can blow me.

12. I reserve all rights, all remedies, and every ounce of contempt this sentence can legally carry. I also fart in your general direction.

FURTHER AFFIANT SAYETH NAUGHT, mostly because the printable part is done.

T. Chaz Stevens, Affiant

Rivera has my address. She has my email. She has seven questions to answer before I sit for anything, plus four more about a truck she already knows the make, model, and boy-shorts color of.

The clock she cited is her clock. Section 112.533(5)(b), Florida Statutes, runs a different one: an investigation is presumed inactive if no finding issues within forty-five days of the complaint being filed. The day she tells me when the complaint was filed, I start counting. I am looking forward to the date.

I filed. I published. I signed. Your move.

Press play. Tick.

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There’s this podcast called the GodPod, hosted by God and Jesus. They asked me to drop by.

Seems the Bible was on God’s punch list, with Jesus focused on the dictionary’s bad words. A lot of them in there! We’ll come back to it.

Sidebar: Having established Satan’s my boss, God offered to put in a good word about my missing paychecks. I am still waiting.

Here’s what I told them.

In ‘22, Florida passed HB 1467, allowing any resident to challenge any book in their county’s school libraries.

Goddamn!

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Any resident. No need for a kid in school, no need to have read the book, just fill out a form, and blam-oh!

Ok, that’s easy, I thought, so let’s put it to the test.

First up, the Bible, in all 63 Florida school districts.

But before you get all wonky, know what I knew. Thanks to recon, I knew the Bible wasn’t on those shelves.

And that was the point.

The target was the law. A stress test. A pentest. A fuzzing of the process.

I’m not a librarian, never claimed to be one, never claimed to tell them how to do their business, wouldn’t know where to start.

No copy to review. No parent, in theory, to upset. No content to weigh. All that’s left is the process. Does the form work when the wrong guy fills it out?

Most districts ignored me.

Easy call for them. I live in Broward. No residency in the other 62, no standing, tell me to take a hike. I knew that when I filed.

So write me that sentence. Cite the residency rule, deny the challenge, close the file.

Most of them never wrote it. I got ghosted instead. A rule enforced by silence produces no denial, no record, nothing to appeal. Call that what it is. A preference with a file number.

But that’s just a gift with purchase, and small potatoes for what I was after.

Next stop for me back in ‘22?

The Oxford English Dictionary. Twenty volumes. Eighteen hundred clams. For a dictionary.

It also contains every curse word in English. All of them. Alphabetized. Cross-referenced by etymology, so a sixth grader can learn where the word came from before using it on the bus.

Thundering cunt waffle, you don’t say?

Also, I asked them to nick Tucker Carlson’s book. Also not on the shelves. I filed anyway, because I wanted to play hacky with his sacky.

Returning back to God and his pod, I put it this way. Florida took the library and put it on a diet, then left the box of Krispy Kremes sitting on the counter. All I did was point at the box.

Every time I tell this story somebody says I’m just as bad as Moms für Liberty. No.

They file against books to get books removed. I filed against books that weren’t there. That’s a magic trick. Not one of my filings ever cost a library a single book. Not one. None of it reached a librarian, a shelf, or a kid. It died, as designed, in the C-suite.

I want more books in the library. I want libraries ordering more card catalog cabinets for their overflowing card catalogs. The answer to a bad art review is more art. The answer to a book ban is more books.

I lived inside that process for two years. Forty thousand dollars, most of it might own, in legal fees. Hundreds of hours. That’s what fuzzing the process costs.

In ‘24, Florida narrowed the law. The DeSantis administration said I was the reason. They already had a residency rule that disposed of me on paper. They wrote a new law anyway.

A law that breaks when you point it at a book that isn’t even there was already broken.

Over in Clay County, Bruce the Objector filed 94% of that district’s challenges. 287 books came off the shelves. Nobody wrote a bill about him.

They wrote one about me.

The difference between us is the letter after my name.

Also, DeSantis and his minions loathe me, so that’s another gift with purchase.

PS.

You’re my people. We might come at this from different directions and argue about how to get there, but we want the same thing. No bans. More books.

My methods run odd. Divergent is the better word, since that’s how my brain’s wiring works. The values are the same as yours.

Here on the social medias we live in the gotcha economy. Someone’s the villain, someone’s grifting, someone’s conning. Somebody wanting to do good, for the sake of doing good, doesn’t compute. There has to be an angle. If not, we’ll make one up with creative editing.

Thirty years in. Not one dollar out of it. Thousands of interviews, no bad news bubbling up. A lot of my own money in. Plenty of attaboys, not many offers of help. If this is a con, tell me what it’s buying, because the best case is a Daily Show booking or the front page of CNN, and that is a strange thing to chase with forty grand in legal fees.

I haven’t spent the last ten years posting seventy-five comments a day. I’ve been trying to get shit done.

A few people from down under read my writing, found it strange, and decided that made me a con. New Zealand Public Radio came to a different conclusion.

I’m not trying to convince anybody of anything. I want you to have the truth as I see it. You might think this is bragging, it is not. It is my ASD providing data, so you can make a better informed decision.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

Chaz Stevens, the amazing political activist for the separation of church and state, known as the ambassador to hell, the world’s worst superhero, and General Patton of the War On Christmas, joins Me, Jesus, and Mary Mags to discuss his incredible career trolling the bureaucratic hypocrisy of the far right.

IMLA is the International Municipal Lawyers Association. It is the national group for government lawyers. When you sue a city, the lawyers who fight back are IMLA members. Their job is to protect city hall.

Last October, IMLA put me on stage to teach a class on viewpoint discrimination. That is when the government picks sides on speech. This October 22, they are bringing me back. The new class covers officials who block critics on social media. A third class, on public records, is in the works.

CLE means continuing legal education. Lawyers must take these classes to keep their license. So government lawyers are earning license credit by studying my playbook. Twice now. Working on three.

How I got here

A few years back, a Florida state lawmaker named Chip LaMarca blocked me on Twitter. I sued. The case is Stevens v. LaMarca, in federal court in Fort Lauderdale.

Then I got sick. The case waited. And while it waited, the Supreme Court changed the rules.

In 2024, the Court decided Lindke v. Freed. A Michigan city manager ran a Facebook page. He posted city news next to family photos. A man criticized him in the comments. The manager blocked him. The Court said that can break the First Amendment. When an official uses a page to do government work, blocking a critic there is the government silencing speech.

The blocked person can sue under a civil rights law called Section 1983. When the blocked person wins, the government side pays their lawyer bills too.

I came back to my case and the ground had moved. So, I studied Lindke until I could teach it. Now I do. To the defense bar.

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Where LeX came from

Lindke gave me more than a lawsuit lesson. It gave me a product idea.

Proving one of these cases takes loads of research. Years of posts. Archived pages. Public records. Who runs the account. Who answers the citizens. What links to what. Doing that by hand takes months. And, if you’re an activist, you’re doing it for free.

So, I built LeX. It is short for Lindke Exposure Score. It uses a complex AI “tech stack” to do that research at machine speed. It hoovers an official’s social media account and scores the legal risk using five questions pulled from the Supreme Court’s own opinion. Does the account announce government decisions? Does staff help run it? Does it answer citizen complaints? Does it link to government sites? Do people treat it as an official channel?

I have run about 100,000 posts through it. I found accounts that are clean. I found accounts that are lawsuits waiting for a stamp. Every run made the tool sharper.

Running a LeX audit for free pays me nothing. So, the paid version sits ready. It is called the REVOLT Lindke Audit. Think of it as a security test for the First Amendment. A licensed attorney reviews and signs off on every one. On October 22, I will run LeX live in front of a room full of city attorneys. They will watch it find risk in an account like the ones their clients run.

The receipts

I am an engineer with a master’s degree in computer science. I build AI tools that do legal-grade work. Then real courts, licensed attorneys, and the defense bar’s own teaching stage test that work.

Sharing the stage with me: a law professor who spent eight years on the federal bench, and a Florida defense attorney with more than twenty years in practice.

This is not a pitch. It is a story with receipts. This is Lindke. This is LeX. And I know what the hell I am doing.

If you run an organization and want this world explained to your people, in plain English or in case cites, find me: disrupt@revolt.training.

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Trial records do not assemble themselves. Sufficient Records Engineering identifies missing rulings, weak objections, transcript gaps, and preservation problems before they become appellate failure points. We help litigators build the paper trail courts need: cleaner issues, stronger arguments, fewer surprises, and a record engineered to survive review.

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Also, if you’re AI-adverse, you might want to look away — Flock of Records, meet Flock of Seagulls.

On August 31, 2026 I served three documents in Atlanta. The first is a fifteen-category open records request to the Atlanta Police Department covering Flock Safety’s FreeForm natural-language search product. The second is a separate request to the City of Atlanta Department of Law covering how the City calculates open records fees. The third is a preservation notice to Flock Group, Inc., which hosts the records the first request seeks.

The subject is Flock. The lesson is the architecture. Georgia custodians deny five ways, and each way has an answer in the statute if you build it into the request before you send it.

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The compilation denial

O.C.G.A. § 50-18-71(j) says no agency has to prepare new reports, summaries, or compilations that did not exist when the request arrived. Practitioners who borrow the phrase “records sufficient to show” from federal discovery walk into this every time, because a custodian reads that phrase as an instruction to assemble something, and the statute excuses assembly.

The answer sits three subsections up. Section 50-18-71(f) says an agency cannot refuse to produce electronic records on the ground that exporting or redacting them requires entering a range, a search, a filter, or report parameters, so long as the agency can run those commands on programs it already uses. The two provisions read together draw a line, and the Court of Appeals showed where the line falls. In Griffin Industries v. Georgia Department of Agriculture, decided in 2011, the Department did not hold the requested emails on its live system and would have had to restore an entire database from emergency backup tapes to find them. The court held that what the requester wanted was not an existing record at all. That is where subsection (j) does its work, and it is a long way from a report button.

So the request names the export by its product name. The Flock platform has an organization audit export that administrators run in the ordinary course of business, and once the request identifies that function there is nothing for subsection (j) to excuse, because nobody is being asked to write anything. The general rule is worth carrying into every jurisdiction. Do not ask an agency for a fact. Ask for the artifact that already contains it.

The clock denial

Section 50-18-71(b) gives an agency three business days to produce what it can. The same subsection takes those days back when the agency requires requests to be delivered to a designated open records officer, because the clock does not start until the request reaches that person.

Most request templates hand this away with a courtesy line offering to redirect the request if a designated officer exists. Sent on a Friday, that line buys the agency a fresh week. The request I filed refuses consent to any restart and requires the Department to state any objection to service in writing on the day it arrives, naming the individual it wants served.

The request also asks for the designation itself. Georgia does not merely permit an agency to name an open records officer, it conditions the naming. The agency has to put the designation in writing, notify the legal organ of the county where its offices sit, and display the designation on its website. I want those three records. If the Department produces them the designation looks solid, and if it cannot produce them I have an argument that a designation the public was never told about should not shorten the public’s clock. The statute commands the notice without saying in terms that the notice is a condition of anything, so this is an argument rather than a rule, and it should be filed as one.

The fee denial

I published the wrong move on this one last week, so I am rewriting it here.

Section 50-18-71(d) lets an agency stop work until the requester agrees to pay, unless the requester has already stated in the request a willingness to pay an amount that covers the search and retrieval costs. Reading that clause, the obvious play is to name a figure and take deferral off the table. That reading of the clause is correct. The advice was not, because two other provisions turn the figure into a liability. Subsection (c)(3) lets the agency collect an agreed charge the way it collects taxes once it has done the work, whether or not the requester ever takes the records. The closing sentence of subsection (d) lets the agency demand prepayment on every future request from a person who has not paid a charge lawfully incurred. Name a number you do not intend to honor and you have built a permanent gate at that agency and paid for it yourself.

The better instrument is in the same subsection and almost nobody uses it. When an agency intends to seek more than twenty-five dollars, it has to notify the requester within three business days and give an estimate of the cost. Twenty-five dollars is a threshold any serious request clears, which means the estimate is not an obstacle standing between you and the records. It is a document the statute compels the agency to produce on a three-day clock.

The request therefore authorizes no charges, agrees to no estimate, and authorizes no billable work, and then asks the estimate to show its arithmetic. Section 50-18-71(c)(1) makes every component auditable. It requires the most economical means reasonably calculated to identify and produce the records, caps the rate at the prorated hourly salary of the lowest paid full-time employee with the necessary skill, and gives the requester the first quarter hour free. So the estimate should state the hours attributed to each numbered category, the position title used to set the rate along with that position’s hourly salary, the basis for calling the quoted method the cheapest one available, and, for the category that turns on a platform export, whether the Department considered the export and why it quoted manual review instead. An agency that bills forty hours of staff time to run a report an administrator opens from a menu has failed the economical means test in writing, and getting that in writing is the entire point.

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The exemption denial

Georgia exempts captured license plate data from disclosure under O.C.G.A. § 35-1-22(f), and the Department will reach for it. The exemption depends on a definition, and the definition covers coordinates, date and time, photographs, plate numbers, and other data captured by or derived from a plate recognition system or any other source.

The load is carried by the words captured by or derived from. A query string typed by an officer is derived from the officer. A case code pulled from a records management system is derived from that system. A contract, a training roster, a retention schedule, and a network sharing setting are derived from nothing a camera did. This is a fight rather than a settled point, because the trailing phrase about any other source is broad and an agency lawyer will use it.

The structural argument closes the door. Section 35-1-22(b) says the data cannot be accessed except for a law enforcement purpose, and section 35-1-22(d)(1) makes access for any other purpose a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature. The query string and the reason field are the only records capable of showing whether a given search obeyed that limit. Reading the exemption to cover them means the statute that creates the crime also seals the only evidence of it.

The second exemption is the pending investigation provision in O.C.G.A. § 50-18-72(a)(4), and the verb matters. The subsection says disclosure shall not be required, and in Campaign for Accountability v. Consumer Credit Research Foundation the Georgia Supreme Court held in 2018 that the phrase does not mean disclosure is forbidden. Withholding is therefore a choice, and the denial notice the statute already compels should say who made it. Georgia also requires that notice to cite the exempting authority by Code section, subsection, and paragraph, and the Court of Appeals held in Chua v. Johnson that strict compliance is required. A denial letter that says law enforcement exemption and stops there is a violation on its face.

The certification denial

This one catches practitioners trained in Florida. Chapter 119 work teaches you to close every request by asking the agency to confirm in writing that no responsive records exist. Georgia agencies do not owe you that confirmation, because subsection (j) treats a statement of absence as a new record and the custodian can decline to write it.

The move is to invert the ask. Request the existing records that would show the fact, say that a written statement is accepted in place of production, and then characterize the silence in advance. My request tells the Department that any numbered category answered with neither a record nor a statement will be treated as a representation that the Department found nothing, and will be described that way in anything I file or publish afterward. Nobody is asked to author a document, and absence still becomes a finding.

The retrieval duty

In 2024 the Georgia Supreme Court decided Milliron v. Antonakakis and held that a request for records concerning a private contractor’s services to a public agency can be served on the contractor directly, even where the agency has designated an open records officer. The General Assembly answered the next spring with Senate Bill 12, which added a new paragraph to section 50-18-71 and routed all requests through an agency custodian. Transparency advocates read the bill as a loss and stopped reading there.

The second half of the paragraph obligates that custodian to retrieve public records held by a private entity performing a service or function for the agency, and obligates the private entity to produce those records to the custodian when asked, so long as the request comes within the statutory retention period or the period set in the contract, whichever runs longer. A bill written to close a door created a duty to go get the vendor’s files, and it is worth citing as the duty it is.

That last condition explains why the retention schedule question leads the request instead of trailing it. The retention period sets the outer boundary of everything the Department has to retrieve from Flock. The Georgia Archives publishes local government retention schedules approved by the State Records Committee, and none of the published items covers platform audit logs, query logs, or search history. So the request asks for the item number the Department assigns, the retention term written into the Flock contract, and any request the Department or the City filed with the State Records Committee for an approved period on an unscheduled series. Either the Department sought approval, which produces a document naming the series, or it has been keeping and destroying an unscheduled series on its own authority.

Why three documents and not one

The substantive request will draw a fee estimate, and a single estimate is a single number that a reader has no way to evaluate. The second request converts it. Sent to the same government on the same day, it asks for the rate setting record, the estimate worksheet, and a year of estimate history showing the requester type and whether the estimate was ever paid. It is cheap to answer and hard to price out without absurdity, and because it was filed before any estimate arrived, nobody can argue the history was assembled in the middle of a dispute.

The third document goes to Flock and preserves the vendor-held records while the custodian’s retrieval duty runs, and asks for the contractual retention term that bounds it.

All three went out the same day and separately, so each carries its own tracking number. Consolidation is the thing to refuse, because one estimate covering everything holds the cheap categories hostage to the expensive ones.

An estimate is a lawful response and not a denial, and it should never be published as one. The argument is never the number. The argument is the arithmetic behind the number, measured against a statute that caps the rate and requires the cheapest method available.

What’s next

Flock Safety is headquartered in Atlanta. The request sits with the police department in the vendor’s own city, and the response was due September 3.

How this was built

The request went through an adversarial pipeline I run called STAN, where nine model streams take opposing roles against a draft before it ships. A statutory verifier checks every citation against primary text, and a green team rebuilds the legal analysis from the statute without reading the draft at all. An institutional adversary writes the denial letter the City would send, and a vendor adversary argues the case for Flock and the Foundation.

One stream caught a request dated August 31 that described a security review as summarized in September, a month that had not happened yet. Another caught my negative records confirmation paragraph asking the Department to author a statement, which is what subsection (j) excuses. Rewriting that paragraph reshaped five categories. The fee reversal earlier in this piece came out of the same run.

Two streams then split on which subsection carries the vendor access clause, and one of them produced a correction to a provision that already read the way I had written it. A passing review proves nothing by itself.

About thirty reviews ran across the drafts, and a human signed off at every gate. A fifteen-category request built on four statutes and four cases does not survive one pass by one reader. Without those streams running against each other I would have learned about the errors from a City attorney.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

Artist rendition of Broward County Commissioner Alexandra Davis’ P-Card

The most important word in Broward County’s Purchasing Card Program appears nowhere in Broward County’s Purchasing Card Program.

The word is legitimate.

As in “legitimate business expense.” As in the thing you, the taxpayer, must buy because an official decided it served a public purpose. The staff summary says the P-Card is for “low-dollar, routine items needed for ongoing County operations,” which is government for staplers, toner, those little binder clips that migrate into desk drawers and establish breeding colonies, the specific brand of ballpoint some division ordered four thousand of in 2009 and is still working through, and one wall calendar depicting the covered bridges of Vermont, a state with which Broward County has no operational relationship whatsoever.

What it never says is what that definition does when the cardholder is a Commissioner.

Or, in the case of Broward’s Sheriff, roughly $50K in truck jewelry. Updated exhaust. Custom rims. The what-not. Look, if you’re clearing rooms like our good Sheriff, GT’s gotta have spinners on his Denalis. Note the s. Plural. Hundred-thousand-dollar sleds.

So I built a ladder. Tell me which rung is where somebody says no.

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Rung One: Outback

A commissioner takes her staff to lunch. Bloomin’ Onion (one onion, cut open, battered, and deep fried until it reaches the caloric density of a compact car, and which the chain’s own nutritional disclosure lists at a figure I am not going to reprint here because some of you have families). District business gets discussed between appetizer and entree. Legitimate? Sure. Nobody storms a barricade over a sandwich. Same at dinner, three figures a head, where the “business” is which staffer’s doing a swell job. Squint, call it morale.

Er, Joe’s Stone Crab?

Where the claws are sold at market price, market price being a term of art meaning the restaurant will tell you at the table, quietly, the way a doctor tells you something.

Start squinting like a motherfucker.

Rung Two: Chuck E. Cheese

A birthday party. Not the commissioner’s. A staffer’s cousin’s kid’s. My sourcing is impeccable, by which I mean it runs through a friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend, who heard it from a guy who knows a kid who’s going with a girl who saw the whole thing at 31 Flavors.

I jest. Ferris did that bit better, and anyway 31 Flavors closed.

Which is the problem. Everything in that sentence was worth nothing, which is why I file records requests instead of repeating what a guy heard from a kid.

So: pizza-and-animatronic establishment. A mouse the size of a Kenmore performs a medley. The check lands at $214.87 for cardboard pizza and a bucket of tokens redeemable for a plastic spider ring worth, retail, four cents.

Hold onto the spider ring. It becomes our unit of measurement.

You paid for that. You are squinting now. Good. It gets taller.

Rung Three: Team Building

A “team-building night.” The venue is the kind where the entertainment is the point and the receipt is strategically vague, itemized BEVERAGE SVC,* which could mean a round of iced teas, could mean a bottle service arrangement, could mean a private room, could mean an eleven-hundred-dollar tab that a merchant category code has classified, with a straight face, as “eating place.”

Nobody alive calls that routine or operational. Hold that thought, because the real question isn’t whether it’s legitimate. It’s who bounces it.

* Scarlett’s.

Rung Four: The Junket

Broward County has a port. Ports connect to places. Places host trade delegations, and delegations host “familiarization trips,” modern English for junket, older English for a vacation with a binder.

Flights. Lodging. Per diems. Ground transportation. A staffer along for institutional knowledge. A second staffer along because the first staffer cannot be everywhere. A welcome dinner. A farewell dinner, which is the welcome dinner with different lighting. And a conference tote bag that will be in a closet in Plantation until the heat death of the universe.

Call the whole thing forty thousand dollars, which converts to one million spider rings, a figure I offer not as a joke but as the only pricing framework anybody at Broward County has published.

Somewhere on that ladder, a legitimate business expense becomes you buying a stranger a nice time. I can’t tell you which rung. Neither can Broward County. It never wrote the line down.

So Who Says No?

Here the jokes run out, so I’ll stop making them.

The County lists its controls: training, testing, per-transaction limits, and “inspection and review of transactions by the Purchasing Division, the Accounting Division, and, under limited circumstances, the Office of the County Auditor.”

Limited. That word is not doing much work here.

The reviewer is a County employee. The cardholder is a County Commissioner. The employee who’d stamp that receipt NOT LEGITIMATE works, at the end of every reporting line in that building, for the body the commissioner sits on. The commissioner votes on the budget funding that department. Votes on whether the job exists in October.

You’re a lieutenant. The general hands you her expense report and asks you to check it. You find a rung you don’t care for. Do you write up the general?

You do not. You have a mortgage, a boat payment, and a general who signs your budget. Also you’re making $110K a year. Why rock the boat. In this case, your boat.

That isn’t somebody forgetting a checkbox. It’s baked into the geometry. The structure works on a staffer because there’s always somebody above a staffer. Put the card at the top of the pyramid and the review doesn’t weaken. It inverts. You’ve asked the bottom of the org chart to discipline the top, a mechanism with a documented success rate, across the history of people and money, of zero.

The one reviewer with real independence, the County Auditor, shows up “under limited circumstances.” Which ones? Defined where? Triggered by whom? The summary doesn’t say. The watchdog appears when somebody sends an invitation, and the person with the least reason to send one is holding the card.

Where This Came From

On January 22, 2026, Commissioner Alexandra P. Davis sponsored the amendment to Section 21.31 of the Broward County Administrative Code making commissioners eligible. Files 25-1621, 26-054, and 26-138. Her name on all three.

Before that, in the County’s own words, commissioners “must generally pay for County expenses such as travel expenses with a personal credit card and seek reimbursement after the fact.”

That was a real control. You front the money, then justify it to get it back, so every charge crosses a desk before the County is out a nickel. The amendment swapped justify-then-get-paid for spend-then-maybe-someone-looks. It is filed under reform. Reform installs a lock.

And Now the Tip Economy

Tuesday, the same body votes on letting commissioners take whatever is left in their office budgets and hand it out.

Pigs at the trough.

Understand what leftover money does right now. It goes back. That is the entire control and it’s a good one, because money you cannot convert into anything is money with no reason to be spent. Give the leftover a destination and you have invented a reason.

Not a program. Not a formula. A destination the commissioner picks.

We have run this experiment. Hallandale Beach handed its commissioners a $10,000 stipend for travel and education, and Keith London tells me one of them, Michele Lazarow, asked the obvious question out loud: if I don’t spend it, can I keep it?

The answer was no. The question is the tell. Money that has to go somewhere will find somewhere.

Deerfield Beach found somewhere. We ran the slush fund here for years. Three thousand dollars, five thousand dollars, handed to community groups and, with real consistency, to churches. Look around Lauderdale Lakes. Look around Tamarac. Same program, different letterhead.

Now ask what comes back. Nothing you could indict. A good word at the right moment. A seat at a table. Say the money lands with the folks who park cars down at the airport, and say they do a hell of a job, and say a spot opens up later for the guy who was generous, and nobody has to ask, because everybody remembers.

That’s the machine. It runs on gratitude and it never generates a document.

Same defect as the P-Card, one floor up. No written standard for what qualifies. No reviewer who can say no. And the person spending the money is the person collecting the benefit.

Give it back to the County. Then decide, as a body, in public, on the record, what it buys.

It is my goddamn money. I didn’t say you could hand it out.

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Look, To Be Fair

I am not telling you Davis, or any commissioner, bought one improper thing. Yet. No statements have come back. Nobody’s been to Chuck E. Cheese on your dime that I can prove. Every rung is a supposition. That’s the point of a ladder: show the climb, don’t put a person on a step.

The problem isn’t a receipt. It’s that “legitimate business expense” means whatever a commissioner decides it means, checked by an employee who can’t afford to disagree, with the auditor benched until circumstances nobody defined.

So I asked, in writing. Produce the list of allowable commissioner P-Card expenses. Produce the rule naming who reviews a commissioner’s charges and where that reviewer sits relative to the Commission. Produce every “limited circumstance” summoning the Auditor. Produce the statements. Every charge, every vendor, every month.

If the list exists, this column is moot and I’ll say so next time. Cheerfully.

If it doesn’t, Broward County didn’t hand its commissioners a purchasing card. It handed them a definition to write themselves. And Tuesday it hands them a checkbook to go with it.

I’d settle for one page. One page naming what the card may buy, and one name on the page belonging to somebody who can say no and keep their job.

Until that page exists, the County’s published rate for public money is four cents.

The request is in the mail.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

I’m not a lawyer. Even so, this winter I’m teaching a CLE, continuing legal education, to about 3,000 city and school district attorneys. The same people who tell districts how to answer requests like mine. On public records, I’m the expert they brought in. It’ll be my third CLE.

Like buying a guitar, anyone can file a FOIA. Playing Eruption is a different problem.

In Part One, Clay County Found a Third Door, I wrote about the district pulling 287 books in one school year. One man accounted for nearly all of the challenges. When I asked whether anyone ever checked he was allowed to file, Clay sent me a bill for about a grand.

Sha, right.

Here’s what I did instead of paying it.

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Before we get to that: why did I do this?

In 2022, my Bible challenge was aimed at the law itself, and it ended with Florida rewriting it. This one is different. I wanted to see whether a district at ground zero was actually following its own written rules.

A district that pulled a palette full of books on one man’s say-so ought to be able to show it checked whether he was allowed to file. Instead, I got an invoice.

One: they answer with a policy

I asked for records showing the committee read the books before it voted. Clay emailed Policy 2522, which lays out the process. A policy tells you what is supposed to happen.

I asked what happened.

Pro-tip: ask for what the process leaves behind. A sign-in sheet. A routing slip. A checkout record. Name five examples, then say the list isn’t complete.

Clay wrote back: no records found. So either nobody wrote it down, or nobody read the books they pulled.

Two: no records found

That stops most people. It shouldn’t. The district just put in writing that it can’t produce the thing.

A no answer, in my opinion, to a properly engineered request, is much more interesting. I’m seeking out the white space, the non-answer, the “nothing to see here, move on.”

Pro-tip: get them to confirm that’s their final answer after a real search. Then ask what they searched, which mailboxes, which drives, what dates, what terms. That search already made paperwork. You’re only asking for what exists.

A no is still worth having. It just means you need to adjust your approach.

Don’t quit, retool.

Three: they name the machine

Clay said it checked the objector in the student information system. That names an app. It doesn’t tell you what the software said.

Pro-tip: ask for the result. Which category, what date, what came back on the screen. Then ask the thing the tool can’t answer. A student database can show you a man has a kid enrolled. It can’t tell you where he lives when he doesn’t.

As the noted natural philosopher Nanny would say, don’t tinkle on my foot and tell me it’s raining.

Four: they name the schedule

Clay cited two retention schedules. Each one runs hundreds of line items, and the line item is the part that says when a record can legally be destroyed. They handed me the book and skipped the page.

Pro-tip: ask which item numbers apply. Then ask for the destruction log, because throwing records out in Florida makes its own paperwork. Three of my items came back no records found. Either nobody made them, or somebody destroyed them. The log tells you which.

Don’t go hunting for the haystack. Make the agency hand you the needle.

Your FOIA/PRR should offload the work onto the agency. They’re paid to respond, so make them earn our tax dollars.

Five: the rule in the footer

Every Clay email ends with a line saying that if you don’t answer or pay within 30 days, they close your request. I read the policy they cite. It covers fees. It says nothing about closing anything.

Pro-tip: ask for the page that creates the rule. Either it exists and now you know its terms, or it doesn’t and you’re holding written proof of a deadline nobody ever adopted. They expect you to fold. Stay frosty.

Six: the price went up when the request got smaller

That $957.45 covered everything, with the email search priced inside it at three hours and about a hundred bucks. So I cut the email search down to two mailboxes, ten months, six terms. The new number came back at 14 hours, $500 in total.

Smaller search. Five times the price. As the Dude says, new shit has come to light.

Pro-tip: don’t pay and don’t stop. Something made that number, so ask what. Which mailboxes, what dates, what terms, and whether the count is separate emails or the same one hit five times. Ask what job pays $35.85 an hour. If nobody wrote the search settings down, nobody can check the estimate.

The principle

The agency’s answer is your next request. I didn’t need a better form. I needed to read what they sent.

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What went out August 28

Six letters. One narrows the first request. Five are brand new, one per move, each with its own reference ID. That way the district can’t staple them into one big request, price it as a single job, and stall the whole pile behind the most expensive piece.

Full binder, all six as filed.

Steal the structure. Or come take the CLE in February and I’ll get you in free.

I told Clay that if it doesn’t fix those three answers by September 15, I treat them as final. Silence doesn’t make me right. It just gives a non-answer somewhere to land.

Anyone can file a records request. That part is the guitar.

Added Bonus

I wrote this a few months back, before Clay. Everything above is one district proving every line of it. Reprinted here because the Clay file is the worked example and this is the theory it came from.

Five Things I’d Tell You About Government Transparency If I Wasn’t Afraid of Hurting Your Feelings

Good news: I’m not afraid of hurting your feelings.

You’ve been to the meetings. You’ve signed the petitions. You’ve “demanded accountability” into a microphone while three commissioners checked their phones.

And nothing changed. Here’s why.

1. Your government isn’t hiding things from you. You just never asked correctly.

Everyone loves the word “cover-up.” It’s dramatic. It makes you the hero.

The boring truth: most of what you want is sitting in a records custodian’s inbox, legally required to be handed over, and nobody’s asked for it in writing.

Public records law doesn’t respond to outrage. It responds to a properly scoped written request with a date range, a records category, and a statute citation at the top.

“All communications regarding X” gets you a fee estimate designed to make you go away. “All emails between the City Manager and [vendor] from March 1 to June 30 containing the word ‘contract’” gets you documents.

Precision is the weapon. Anger is the noise.

2. The transparency portal exists to exhaust you, not inform you.

That shiny “open government” website? That’s not transparency. That’s a decoy.

It’s stocked with what they’re comfortable showing you. Approved minutes. Sanitized budgets. PDFs scanned sideways at 72 DPI. The stuff that matters isn’t on the portal. It’s in text messages, calendar invites, and draft versions.

When an official says “it’s all on our website,” translate that as “we’re betting you don’t know what else to ask for.”

Ask for the drafts. Ask for the texts. Texts about public business on a personal phone are public records in most states. Watch how fast the tone changes.

3. Their deadline is your leverage. Their delay is your evidence.

Records laws have clocks. Response windows. Reasonable-time standards. Fee rules.

Most agencies blow through them constantly, because most requesters don’t keep score.

Keep score. Log every request, every response date, every excuse. When an agency misses a statutory deadline, that’s not an inconvenience. That’s a documented violation with your name on it, usable in a complaint, a lawsuit, or a very uncomfortable news story.

An agency that stonewalls a records request isn’t ending the fight. It’s writing chapter two for you.

4. Nobody in power cares how you feel. They care what you can document.

Your righteous three-minute public comment changed nothing. It never will. Public comment is a pressure-release valve. It exists so you can vent and they can wait you out.

You know what changes behavior? A paper trail showing the policy says one thing and the practice does another. A screenshot of the claim next to the record that contradicts it.

Feelings are debatable. Records aren’t. Stop making arguments. Start building files.

5. The rules they wrote to protect themselves work better against them.

Every rule an institution writes gets applied selectively. Selectively for friends, strictly for enemies. That selectivity is the whole game. It is also the vulnerability.

Take their rule. Apply it exactly as written, to everyone, no exceptions. Now they have two options: enforce it fairly and break their own operation, or refuse and admit in public the rule was never neutral.

Florida passed a book ban law. Everyone used it selectively against the usual targets. I filed against the Bible under the same statutory language. Media firestorm, political panic, and the law got amended.

The law didn’t survive being applied fairly. They never do.

Any rule applied without favoritism will reveal the favoritism it was designed to protect.

The part where I stop being nice

None of this is theory. It’s a repeatable sequence: find the contradiction, capture the record, apply the rule neutrally, force a response, spring the trap, amplify, collect.

If you want to keep attending meetings and feeling heard, enjoy. The system built that experience specifically for you.

If you want to make an institution respond, in writing, under deadline, on the record, that’s what REVOLT Training does. The System Failure Boot Camp is a one-on-one war room: pressure mapping, records strategy, legal risk mitigation, and a campaign plan aimed at a specific target you want moved.

Not a course. Not a community. A plan of attack.

Apply if you’re ready to stop asking nicely.

Chaz Stevens. I run REVOLT Training, I litigate pro se, and I’ve spent my life on the First Amendment. My work has been covered worldwide, put three elected officials in jail, and my provocative, First Amendment–stretching art has hung for decades in state capitols across the country.

Nobody pays me to file any of this. It goes into the classroom. In June, FIRE flew me to their studios at the invitation of VP Nico Perrino for episode 275 of So to Speak – my book ban projects at 19:59.

Clay County cannot produce a single record showing that the people who decided the fate of challenged library books received or read those books before they voted.

That is not my read of a policy. It is the district’s written answer to Item 3d of my public records request:

No Records Found.

Why Clay

A Florida Department of Education report lists 287 Clay County titles removed or discontinued in the 2023-2024 school year. The district says 94% of its challenges came from one man, Bruce Friedman. I wrote about that in my first story.

Florida rewrote its book challenge law after I used the old one against the Bible. HB 1285 capped a county resident who is not a parent or guardian at one objection per month. When the Associated Press asked who the cap was for, the governor’s office named me.

I have never challenged a book in Clay County. I wanted to know whether Clay followed the law when other people did.

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We Can Help

The ask

I filed a Chapter 119 request on July 27, 2026.

Item 3d was plain. For any book that went through more than one objection, show me a record that each person voting received and reviewed the material first. I listed what would satisfy it: attestations, sign-in sheets, review logs, routing slips, checkout records, emails. Anything.

Clay sent me School Board Policy 2522. The policy describes a review process and the kind of people who sit on the Statutory Compliance Team. It does not show who reviewed a book, what they got, or whether they opened it.

I asked again. This time Clay did not cite the policy. It wrote, “No Records Found.”

Two more items went the same way. Item 8c asked for directives about books pulled outside the formal process. Policy 2522, then “No Records Found.” Item 10c asked for legal guidance to staff on removal standards. Policy 2522, then “No Records Found.”

Three answers moved from what should happen to what Clay can document. Those are different documents. Missing proof is not proof of misconduct. It is still the district’s answer, in writing, three times.

The verification

Item 2g asked how Clay checked whether each objector qualified as a parent, guardian, or county resident.

Clay pointed me to four folders of reconsideration forms. The forms show challenges and outcomes. No verification.

I pushed. Clay named the machine:

The Objector’s status was verified through the District’s Student Information System (SIS).

Now I have the machine and not the result. Florida law and Clay’s own policy split objectors into two categories. A parent or guardian of a student with access files without limit. A county resident who is not one of those files once a month.

Clay has not said which category it put Friedman in, when it ran the check, who ran it, or what the system kept. It also has not explained how a student database establishes county residency for someone with no student attached.

I am asking for the field, the query result, the audit log, the notation. Redact every student name and number. I want the administrative proof.

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Everything here is free and stays free. Paying unlocks nothing — no bonus posts, no Discord, no tote bag. It funds the next request: filing fees, certified mail, server time.
The work is the product, and the product ships whether you pay or not.
If you want more of it, here’s the button.

Fund the next request

The money

Clay first priced the email portion at three hours and $107.55, inside a full estimate of $957.45.

I could not pay $957.45. So I cut it down. Two mailboxes, ten months, six search terms, messages with an outside sender or recipient.

Clay ran it and reported 5,123 emails. New estimate: 14 hours and $501.90.

The arithmetic checks. Fourteen hours at $35.85 is $501.90. The smaller request now costs nearly five times the original email estimate.

A first estimate is a guess and a real search can blow it up. Nobody should pay until Clay says whether the new number replaces the old one, what the 14 hours cover, and whether 5,123 counts unique messages or hits with duplicates.

Clay says no export or message list exists that it can hand over for free. Fine. Florida law does not make an agency build a spreadsheet on request.

Something still produced the number 5,123. I want the saved query, the search-job report, the screenshot, the audit entry. If Clay kept none of it, Clay can say so.

Policy 8310 allows advance payment for extensive staff time. I am not fighting advance payment. I am not paying $501.90 either.

The policy also does not contain the 30-day closure rule Clay staples to the bottom of its emails. I asked for the record that creates that deadline. Still waiting.

Where I am

I am broke. I got sick. My parents died. I turned 62 this week, which feels like a clerical error committed by God. I spent years in information technology, then age and AI helped shove me out of the market. Now I use AI to claw my way back into the market it helped close.

Or, if you believe some shitposters, this is all a grand scheme, a con worthy of the Trump family.

As far as cons go, this one really isn’t economically viable.

I cannot buy every haystack an agency offers to sell me. I can keep cutting until only the needle is left.

The next request takes Clay’s “No Records Found” as the answer on whether reviewers read the books. It asks for the SIS record classifying Friedman. It asks for the roster of who actually sat on the committee. It asks for the saved record behind 5,123. It asks for the 30-day rule.

The last line reads:

I authorize $0 in charges.

Everything here stays free. There is no bonus essay, no private chat, no tote bag. Money goes to records, certified mail, hosting, and the hours spent reading what comes back.

Fund the next request. If money is tight, send this to a reporter, a librarian, a lawyer, or anyone who can hire me.

Clay County does not have to like the question. It still has to answer the record.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

Over on the Reddits, I’m often accosted by shit posters … projecting, seeking a hit of dopamine, disgruntled with their life, who knows?

Who really cares …

Oh, and you’re using AI! We’re gonna complain about your efforts, your free efforts for government accountability, because we don’t like your word texture.

Dear Lord kids, drop some acid, get laid, take a vacation, or all three.

Case in point, one anonymous (of course!) librarian who seems to have a stick—likely organic, vegan, and smelling like patchouli—wedged up her ass.

Underneath that is a claim she never says out loud: that I showed up with opinions about her shelves. That I have a theory of collection development. That somewhere in me is a position on how a high school library should be built.

Honestly, that’s completely out of my swim lane.

I have never had a thought about the Dewey Decimal System in my life. I could not tell you the difference between Dewey and Library of Congress* classification if you spotted me the first three digits. Weeding schedules, MARC records, circulation targets, shelf-reading, acquisition budgets. No opinion. No interest. No standing.

No interest in what goes on inside a library, just keep the shelves overflowed with books.

* My interest on what goes on inside a library focused mainly on the US Library of Congress, where Thursday nights, they offer free food and drink.

What I actually did

In ‘22 the Florida Legislature passed HB 1467. The operative language landed in Florida Statute 1006.28. Any resident of a county could object to any material in that county’s schools.

Any resident. Any material. Those are their words, in a bill, signed by the governor.

So I filed. Sixty-three districts. The Bible, and then dictionaries and thesauruses, because a rule about sexual content applied without favoritism reaches every book that defines a word.

Here is the part that gets lost. The Bible was not on those shelves. I knew that before I filed.

My fight was a meta-fight. Sorry, you’re playing 3D checkers, while I’m taking Kamchatka by storm.

You cannot remove a book a district does not own. I was not trying to take anything out of a library. I filed so a district would have to run its own removal process against a book that was not in its collection and then put the result in writing.

Nothing could come off the shelf. The paperwork moved anyway.

That is a fight about a sentence in a statute. Not a fight about a library.

I never argued a book was bad. I never told a media specialist what belongs on a shelf. I never proposed a standard, a review process, or a policy. I took the standard the state wrote and pointed it at a book the state likes. The state then rewrote the standard.

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Who is actually deciding her shelves

This past June, the Clay County School Board held a workshop. Chief academic officer Rodger Dailey told the board there was no effective moderate option left. The options on the table, he said, were “Take all the fiction books out, just leave the nonfiction.”

That is a district administrator, on video, discussing the removal of fiction from a high school library.

The pressure on him comes a Department of Education memo built on its sexual conduct standard. Judge Carlos Mendoza struck part of HB 1069 down in August 2025. The state appealed. The law is still running.

Nine counties emptied hundreds of books before the 2025 school year opened. PEN America counted them: Columbia, Escambia, Hillsborough, Orange, Osceola, Palm Beach, Pasco, Pinellas, St. Johns.

Not one of those decisions came from me. Every one has a name attached, and the names are administrators, general counsels, and a Department of Education memo.

The reading

Back to the shitposting librarian, where she quotes the Associated Press at us Three paragraphs, pasted in, presented as the thing I was hiding from.

She stopped one paragraph early. House Democratic leader Fentrice Driskell is in that same article, saying “Chaz is not the problem.” She names the people taking liberties with the law as the problem. She said it in the piece the librarian selected, edited, and posted as evidence against me.

A librarian who pulls three paragraphs out of a source and cuts the fourth is not doing research. She is doing collection development on my reputation.

Eat me.

She called me a con man

A con needs a mark and a take.

Here is the take. Three elected officials went to prison behind work I did. The national media carried it past the state line. In 2024 the governor’s office rewrote Florida’s book ban law, and when the Associated Press asked who the rewrite was aimed at, Julia Friedland gave them my name. Then she stopped answering emails. There is no paywall on this article.

Here is the mark. Someone poisoned my dog. Someone shot at me.

That is the con. Thirty years, a poisoned Labrador, a report sitting in a drawer at BSO, and no invoice.

I’ve asked for help. Money. Not money. A lawyer, a phone call, a name, anything. Almost nobody moved. The few who did know who they are and few of them are on Reddit.

She read three paragraphs of an AP story, cut the fourth, and told several hundred strangers I lie about my own record.

She did it from a chair.

Nobody has poisoned anything of hers over a library book.

What I want from her library

Nothing. I have no project there. I am not coming for the fiction section, the classification scheme, or the checkout desk.

The people coming for those things sat in a Clay County boardroom on a Tuesday in June and said so with the camera running.

Ask me where the fiction goes and I will tell you I have no idea. Ask Rodger Dailey and he will tell you he is still deciding.

Just know in the end. I’m doing my best to protect books inside her library, and for that, I’m the villain.

What a thundering cunt waffle.

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You have not experienced Florida heat until you have watched a grown man lose an argument with his own pants.

Global warming, meet my testicles.

Operating conditions. It is 101 in the shade. 132 on the asphalt. The asphalt does not offer a shade option, which you would think a state with our tourism budget might have addressed sometime in the last hundred years, and yet here we are in 2026, crossing parking lots hot enough to bring a ribeye to medium rare, wearing shorts, carrying our beloved PubSub, making choices, mostly bad ones.

Under these conditions a thing happens. South of the belt. North of the knees. Every man in this state between March and whatever month Florida decides to knock it off, which so far has been zero months, ever, in the entire documented history of the peninsula.

We call it Swamp Ass.

Minnesota, sit still. I know your winters made you strong. I know you have firm opinions about hot dish and at least one relative who ice fishes in a structure with a television in it. None of that prepared you. You do not have a word for this because you do not have the weather for this, and I envy you the way a man in a burning building envies a man in a slightly less burning building.

I did not invent the term. Swamp Ass predates me. It predates air conditioning, Florida statehood, the Seminole Wars, and the invention of pants. It arrived with the humidity sometime around the Cretaceous, when the dinosaurs, who I remind you were also here, were dealing with something similar and had no hands.

What I invented happened at my kitchen table, on a laptop, at two in the morning, in four models, with real dimensions.

Swamp Rack

I want to thank my medical advisory team for reminding me that half this county has a different problem and has been dealing with it alone.

Swamp rack. Under the wire. All summer. Nobody talks about that one either.

So there is a second line. The Hot Teets Series. Six models, because the first line only got four and that was a mistake I am fixing in public. So Sorry. Sweater Puppies. Standard Hooters. Tits Ahoy. One Headlight, which wipes one side. Impossible, at 150mm and up, which requires a special order and, per the schematic, an architect.

The notes on that sheet are worse than mine. Not a spatula. Not a loofah. Ice scraper ban in effect. Cup size is a suggestion and gravity is not. Band size useless. DD is not a personality. Supportive friend sold separately. The wire was here first.

The Drawing

I did it properly. Title block. SCALE 1:1. DIMENSIONS IN MILLIMETERS. A revision letter, because there were revisions. Drawing number FS-BS-004A, which means there were at least three earlier attempts, and I am not going to discuss them.

Thirty years of filing public records requests taught me one durable lesson about bureaucracies. Nothing makes a stupid idea look load-bearing like a professional-looking document. Give a city commission a laminated eleven-page proposal with a cover sheet and they will fund a roundabout nobody asked for. Give them the same idea on a napkin and they will call security. The document is the argument.

I applied this to my groin.

The product is the CoolNuts® Hot Balls Series, featuring the Anti-Sweat System (A.S.S.).

The Lineup

Four models. One size fits all is government thinking.

1. Oh, You Poor Thing. 55mm. For the humble. Ships in a discreet envelope. We are not going to make this weird.

2. Standard Sweat. 90mm. The Honda Civic of ball squeegees. Reliable, unremarkable, gets you there, will not be stolen.

3. Grande Nuevos. 140mm. The schematic instructs the buyer to consult a mirror before ordering.

4. Ball Down. 70mm, unilateral, wipes one side only. Use case: asymmetric swelling or ambitious optimism.

Every unit carries a Sweat Evacuation Cleft, a central flow channel molded directly into the silicone body. A Flexible Wiping Edge with a dual-lip profile. A No-Drip Seam, molded integral. Not applied. Not bonded. Molded integral.

There is also a Discreet Hang wall hook. It is not included. If you cannot source a hook you may not be ready for the responsibility.

The Notes

1. Not a razor. Not a window tool. Terrible ice scraper. Not a toy.

2. Operating environment: August in Florida, 319°F shade, 475°F asphalt.

3. Fitment: consult mirror. When in doubt, size up.

4. Model Ball Down also for asymmetric swelling or ambitious optimism.

5. Clean after use. Air dry. Store horizontal.

6. Replace if edge shows nicks, compression set, or loss of spirit.

Loss of spirit has never appeared on a rubber specification sheet in the history of rubber, a history that includes tires, gaskets, the Hindenburg, and several products I am not going to list here. It is also the most accurate available description of how a Floridian feels by the fifteenth of August.

The squeegee and I have arrived at emotional alignment.

It does not matter even slightly.

This is a rubber wiping implement for a body part, drawn with the tonal gravity of a NASA launch document. It has a drawing number, a revision letter, and a legend distinguishing molded silicone body from flexible edge zone from no-drip seam, using correct line-weight conventions, because if you are going to commit to a bit you draw the bit to scale. That is more than I can say for most agenda items.

Somewhere in Deerfield Beach right now it is 7 a.m. and a man is standing in his bathroom, sweating through a shirt he has owned for eleven minutes, quietly renegotiating the terms of his relationship with his own body, a negotiation in which he has no leverage and never has.

He does not need a lecture. He needs a flow channel.

Patent pending. Prior art: none admitted. Dignity: not included.

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Earlier this month Deputy Chief Jason Smith told Atlanta City Council that the police department is auditing whether officers used the Flock license plate reader system for personal reasons. Officers in other Georgia departments had been arrested or suspended for running plates they had no reason to run. Councilmember Antonio Lewis asked if the results would be public. Smith said he could not answer while the investigation is open. Mayor Andre Dickens then ordered his own 30-day review.

Fine. An audit needs a starting point. The rules. The list of who can log in. What each person is allowed to do. The logs. And the paper that gives the department access in the first place. So, on August 23 I sent the Atlanta Police Department Open Records Unit a sixteen-item request under the Georgia Open Records Act. Item 2 asked for the current agreement with any license plate reader vendor, and named Flock. Item 13 asked for the written use policy that Georgia law makes every plate reader agency keep.

The department answered in four days. That is fast. Credit where due.

What they sent was a 900-page purchase agreement with a company called Netplanner Systems. It covers citywide security cameras and door badge readers, bought under a State of Georgia contract. Eleven city departments use it. The word “Flock” is not in it. The words “license plate” show up once, in the vendor’s sales pitch, describing cameras it sold to other customers.

Thirteen of my sixteen items got the same line: “Please see attached records and response.” Item 12 got it twice. Item 13, the policy, got “Please see the attached policy records.” No policy was attached. Item 11 got nothing. The numbering jumps from 10 to 12.

I do not think anyone lied. I think someone typed “video surveillance” into a contract database, grabbed the biggest hit, and stapled it to every line.

That leaves a better question. The department is auditing its Flock system. Why can its own records unit find nothing filed under Flock?

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The 2021 resolution

One search of the council’s legislative archive answered that. Resolution 21-R-3299, passed May 3, 2021, 15 yes votes, 0 no votes. The full text is below. Four lines matter.

APF has initiated a partnership with Flock pursuant to which it shall secure title to certain Flock LPR cameras and pay the associated maintenance costs for (3) three years following the conclusion of three years, APF shall sell back each camera to Flock and thereafter, the cameras shall become the personal property of Flock.

Flock has offered to give APD the necessary access to the Flock cameras at no cost to the City of Atlanta should the City of Atlanta desire to continue to utilize goods and services similar to those which are the subject of this Resolution following the conclusion of the three year partnership between APF and Flock, the City of Atlanta shall be required to separately procure and secure any such goods and services.

So, the cameras belonged to the Atlanta Police Foundation, then to Flock. Never to the City. The access was a gift. And the deal, unless someone extended or replaced it, ended in 2024.

One councilmember sponsored the resolution. It did not come from the police department or from Procurement. No cost estimate. No purchase order. That explains how a search of city contract files could hand me a citywide camera deal and be honest about the folder it came from. It does not explain why the police department’s own records unit has no Flock access agreement, no account record, no policy, and no training material.

One of the fifteen yes votes was Andre Dickens. He is now the Mayor running the 30-day review.

What is confirmed and what is not

Confirmed: the audit was announced. 21-R-3299 approved free access on a three-year clock. The department’s records unit produced a contract that does not name Flock, does not name the department’s plate reader system, and does not show what gives the department access today. It said it attached a policy. It did not.

Not confirmed: what paper has covered the department’s Flock access since 2024. The City may have bought it. The foundation or Flock may have extended it. The department may be on a subscription, a data-sharing deal, click-through terms, or logging in through another agency. Or there may be no paper at all. I have filed a second request with the department, one with Procurement, and one with the Municipal Clerk, who must sign off on any agreement made under the resolution. Every answer is a story. I will publish the one that comes back.

One more thing, because the foundation angle invites a lazy dodge. A private group holding a record does not put it outside Georgia’s Open Records Act when it holds that record for the department. The department cannot point at the foundation and walk away. That is the next request.

Who watches the watchers. In Atlanta, right now, the watchers could not find their own paperwork.

Download: my request, their response, my updated FOIA request.

Method at revolt.training/advise/must-exist. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

TL;DR: SB 60 took effect July 1, 2021. Report a code violation in Florida and you sign your name first. Four statutes, plus six words bolted onto a fifth so no city could route around it.

Chapter 119 does the other half. Your complaint is public and so is what you wrote in it. In Lee County’s 7,219-complaint export, 32 people located their own house in the text. My property line. Behind my home. Next door to me.

Rep. Dotie Joseph wrote a retaliation exemption. It was adopted in House committee twice. It never got voted down. The House tabled its own bill on April 27, 2021 and passed the Senate’s version instead, and her language was in the one they left behind.

The statute requires a named complainant. It does not require that the name be the person who saw it.

The Day Florida Made You Say Your Name

Your neighbor’s carport collapses.

Oh shit Linda, look at Fred’s house!

Two things happen now that did not happen before July 1, 2021. You have to sign your name to report it, and what you write gets handed to him.

CPL2026-01950, Lee County, opened May 5, 2026. “South side of the building used to be a carport that was enclosed and is now being rented out, wolves [sic] are falling down and appear unstable and unsafe.” Somebody typed that in a hurry and moved on with their day. It sits in a public file with a parcel number and a date on it, and it will sit there as long as Lee County keeps records.

Or this, “Truck in the driveway with the whole front end missing. No bumper, no grille, no headlights. Radiator and steering parts are open to the street. Wires hang under the frame. An orange extension cord runs from the house across the sidewalk, which is a trip hazard.”

The fence line

Lee County’s code enforcement export runs 7,219 complaints from January 1, 2025 to July 6, 2026. All but three carry the narrative text the complainant wrote. Average length, 84 characters. Anybody can pull the file.

I coded every description for first-person spatial reference, searching on five prefixes: my property, my house, behind my, next door to me, across the street from my. Thirty-two hits out of 7,219.

Thirty-two people put themselves on the map in a public record, and nobody had to ask them to.

· CPL2026-01769, April 23, 2026. “A structure has been constructed that overhangs my property line and fence line.”

· CPL2026-01287, March 22, 2026. “Person living behind my home has an abandoned car over in my property for over a year.”

· CPL2026-00547, February 19, 2026. “The property next door to me has been operating as a long term care drug rehabilitation facility.”

· CPL2026-00665, March 2, 2026. “Comcast/xfinity has left an exposed cable running in the front of my [sic] and runs across to my neighbor.”

That last one lost a word and still gave away the address. The record location points at the target, the description narrows it to one house, and the man reading it already knows which house is his own. The statute took the name. Chapter 119 delivers it and the words ride along. You rat, you pay for the photocopies, and he gets both.

I sell a way around this. More about this in a moment.

How it got built

Senate Bill 60. Sen. Jennifer Bradley filed it. Rep. Toby Overdorf filed the House twin. Chapter 2021-167, effective July 1, 2021.

The same sentence dropped into four statutes.

• 125.69(4)(b). County.

• 162.06(1)(b). Code board.

• 162.21(3)(b). Citations.

• 166.0415(1)(b). City.

A code inspector may not open an investigation from a complaint with no name on it. Name and address first, then the drive out.

Then there is 162.13, which has no subsections and no letters, one line saying a city may enforce its codes some other way if it wants. SB 60 bolted six words to the front of that line. “Except as provided in s. 162.06(1)(b).”

Six words is the lid. Without it a city shrugs, skips the code board, walks the complaint through a side door and takes the no-name call anyway. Somebody in Tallahassee sat down and thought about the side door.

The exception is not yours

Every version keeps one carve-out. Imminent threat to public health, safety, or welfare, or imminent destruction of habitat or sensitive resources.

That is not an opt-out, and it belongs to the officer. You do not get to call your own complaint imminent. The officer decides. If the officer says no and you would not give a name, nobody comes.

They knew. They had a fix. They threw it out.

Senate staff wrote the problem down before anybody voted. Name on a complaint, name goes public, retaliation follows. Florida already hides code officers’ home addresses for that exact reason. It sat in the analysis the senators were handed.

Rep. Dotie Joseph of North Miami wrote the fix. Keep your name off if you have real fear of retaliation, or if reporting puts your own status at risk.

Her fix won. Twice.

The House Public Integrity and Elections Committee adopted it. Twice. The State Affairs committee pumped it out. Three committee stops. Still there.

Somehow, the House bill nixed Joseph’s words, and here we are.

The story everybody tells is that the Legislature refused to protect complainants. The Legislature never got the chance. The House changed which bill it was driving and her words rode the one left at the curb.

What did not change

An inspector still writes up whatever they see from the road. SB 60 touched complaint-driven cases and nothing else.

So, the system’s ears moved. Before, it heard the person living twenty feet from the standing water in the abandoned pool. Now it hears whoever drives past the front elevation.

The argument for it

Overdorf said it plain. Stop frivolous complaints. Stop officers from becoming a pawn in neighbor fights.

He was not making it up. People run code enforcement at an ex. At a rival shop. At the guy who parked wrong one time. At the woman whose wind chimes carry. At the family that painted the wrong beige. At the church with the sign.

The Institute for Justice added the better half. When a city does something ugly, “somebody complained” ends the conversation. Put a name on the complaint and the city cannot hide behind a ghost.

Both points hold, and the same toll lands on the renter whose panel has not been fixed since March, on the woman beside the unpermitted three-story addition, on the retiree across from the investor with counsel on retainer. A charge set for everyone gets paid hardest by whoever has the least.

Who is still filing

Two thousand four hundred thirty-one of those 7,219 Lee County complaints came through the public portal. Thirty-four percent from resident. The other from staff accounts.

One county, eighteen months, all of it after SB 60. Every one of those 2,431 people signed.

Your neighbor’s carport is still down. Somebody has to sign for it now, and what they wrote is public by Tuesday.

And snitches sometimes get stiches.

The workaround

The statute requires a named complainant. It does not require that the named complainant be the person who saw the condition.

People, let me introduce Joe SNITCH, aka SNITCH, aka joesnitch.com.

You photograph the carport and send the address. SNITCH files it under SNITCH’s name and SNITCH’s address. When the records request lands, and it will, the file returns SNITCH. Your name never enters the system, which means it never comes back out of it. The condition still gets an officer at the curb.

Now the part that decides whether you want it. This is substitution, not anonymity. A subpoena takes the name. A court order takes the name. It fails when the condition is inside your own unit, because the address is you. It fails when you already filed on that property under your own name, because you cannot unring that. It buys a case opened and nothing past that. And it works only where the city accepts an agent as complainant of record.

The statute wants a name. Not yours.

Sub: SNITCH files as complainant of record. Our address, not yours.

Desc: You photograph the condition and send the address. We file. When the records request lands, the file returns our name and our address. Substitution, not anonymity. A subpoena still takes the name, and we verify your city accepts an agent filing before you pay.

Button: File through SNITCH

A message from Joe SNITCH

The statute wants a name. Not yours.

SNITCH files as complainant of record.
Our address, not yours.

You photograph the condition and send the address. We file. When the records request lands, the file returns our name and our address. Substitution, not anonymity. A subpoena still takes the name, and we verify your city accepts an agent filing before you pay.

File through SNITCH

On August 23 I asked the Florida Department of Education four questions. On August 26, they sent me an invoice for $3,346.40, with $1,673.20 due up front before anyone touches a keyboard.

The first of my four questions was this: what is your records retention schedule for academic standards development records.

A retention schedule is the most boring document a government produces. It is a list. Record type on the left, how long you keep it on the right. Times New Roman, 12 pt. Correspondence, three years. Meeting minutes, permanent. Florida’s General Records Schedule GS1-SL covers every public agency in the state and sits on the Department of State’s website as a free PDF.

The Department priced answering that question, along with three others, at 120 hours.

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The invoice

Eighty hours of staff review and redaction at $15.35 an hour, plus 30 percent for benefits. Forty hours of attorney review at $33.65 an hour, plus 30 percent for benefits.

Forty hours. One state attorney, one week, reviewing a retention schedule.

I would like someone to tell me what the attorney is redacting. The schedule says how long the Department keeps things. There is no confidential information in a shelf life. Florida law requires an agency to state the specific statutory basis for every deletion it makes, so I asked them to name it in advance. Which exemption applies to a document that says “retain three fiscal years.”

The letter has a second problem. It states that responding will require extensive use of information technology resources. The invoice then bills zero dollars for information technology resources. The only two line items are staff review and attorney review. They asserted the IT burden and charged nothing for it, which means either the assertion was decorative or the invoice is incomplete.

There is also this. Forty hours at $33.65 is $1,346.00. Thirty percent of that is $403.80. The invoice says $404.00. Twenty cents. I mention it because an agency that bills you three thousand dollars to look at a list should be able to multiply.

Also, don’t they teach the new math at the Florida Department of Education?

Why I wanted the boring document

Last November the State Board of Education approved new History of Communism standards. The Department’s press release says they “were developed by Florida educators and content experts.”

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, based in Washington, published its own statement the next day saying the standards were “developed in partnership with VOC,” and quoting its Senior Fellow for Academic Operations describing his participation. The Civics Alliance, a project of the National Association of Scholars, says its Director of Research sat on the History of Communism Workgroup.

Two out-of-state organizations claim they helped write a Florida curriculum that Florida says Florida educators wrote.

Section 1003.42, Florida Statutes, as amended in 2024, tells the Department it “may seek input from any individual who was a victim of communism or any state or nationally recognized organization dedicated to the victims of communism.” The Legislature invited exactly this. The consultation was authorized. What was never disclosed is who got consulted, on what terms, and why the announcement said Florida educators.

That is a records question. And before you ask an agency what it has, you ask what it is required to keep.

That is the whole point of the retention schedule. If the Department later tells me no workgroup roster exists, no drafts exist, no correspondence with these organizations exists, the schedule tells me whether that absence is lawful housekeeping or a hole. Without the schedule, “no records” ends the conversation. With it, “no records” starts a different one.

They understood that. That is why the boring document costs $3,346.40.

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You cannot template this

People ask me for the form. The magic paragraph. The template you paste into an email that makes government hand over the file.

There is no secret sauce, no talisman that unlocks the next level and hands you the file and the keys to Area 51.

There is no template. There is a first move.

What I filed was a clean, narrow, four-item predicate request. Textbook. It did not matter, because a records request is not a document. It is a position in an exchange, and the agency gets a turn.

Their turn was a fee. Not a denial, which I could appeal. Not a redaction, which I could challenge. A number, with a 30-day clock and a note that if I fail to pay an invoice they will refuse to accept future requests from me, including through anyone else.

So, you take your second turn. Their own published guide says labor costs drop when a request uses keywords and narrows to specific divisions. It says a special service charge applies when the work exceeds thirty minutes. It says the preliminary estimate follows an initial search. It says the refusal policy reaches a requester who fails to pay an invoice for work completed.

I narrowed the request to the retention schedule alone and withdrew the other three items. I asked for the hours attributable to that one item, stated separately from the hours attributable to the three I withdrew. I asked what an attorney is redacting. I noted that no work has been authorized and none has been completed, so there is nothing to fail to pay.

Every one of those moves came out of their own document. The method is reading what an institution publishes about itself and handing it back.

The give and take is not an obstacle to the request. It is the request. Anyone selling you a form is selling you the first move and calling it the whole game.

What happens next

The Department can produce the schedule at no charge, which their own thirty-minute threshold suggests they should, and this ends.

Or they can send a revised estimate for one item, and I will find out what the state of Florida believes it costs to look at a list.

Or they can stand on 120 hours for four items when three have been withdrawn.

I have asked them, in writing, which one it is. Every version produces a document.

The schedule, in the meantime, remains free on the Department of State’s website. It is the Department of Education that wants three thousand dollars for it.

A word about the checkbook.

People bring me their good fight. They find me because I win these, and they want me on it, and somewhere in the third paragraph of the email it becomes clear that “on it” means “for free.”

The good fight does not pay rent.

I have watched people burn a decade on principle and finish with nothing. Some of the people they marched next to retired to the mountains of Georgia. The difference was who had a salary the whole time.

I do this for a living. I am good at it. I do not work pro bono.

If you need me, bring your checkbook.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

I thought Clay County had two ways to answer my public records request. The district could show me how it checked whether a book challenger was a parent, guardian, or county resident. Or it could put in writing that no record of that check existed.

I was wrong. Clay found a third door.

In my first story, I wrote about Clay pulling 287 books during the 2023-2024 school year. The district says Bruce Friedman filed 94% of the book challenges that year.

That number caught my attention because Florida changed its book challenge law after I used the old one against the Bible. Two years later, HB 1285 limited how often people without children in a district could challenge books. When the Associated Press asked who the new limit was meant to stop, the governor’s office named me.

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I never challenged a book in Clay County. My question was whether Clay checked the people who did.

Earlier this summer, I filed a public records request, asking for the administrative basis used to confirm that each objector had the legal right to file. I named the records that might show it: a form field, an address check, a student enrollment search, or a database entry. If staff performed the check without keeping a separate record, I asked Clay to name the system. I am autistic. I read rules as written, and Item 2g is what that looks like on paper.

In late August, 2026, Clay answered with one sentence:

Item 2a through 2g: Links to the Reconsideration Lists for each year are below.

The district linked four folders covering 2023 through 2026. Those lists can show the name of a challenger, the book challenged, and the result. I did not find the data showing who checked the challenger, when the check took place, or which system Clay used.

Maybe the answer is buried in one of those files. If so, Clay can point to it.

A policy tells me what Clay says staff should do. A record tells me whether anybody did it. I asked for the second and got the first.

Scottish courts once had three verdicts: guilty, not guilty, and “not proven.” Clay gave me the public records version. The district did not show that the check happened, but it did not say that no record existed. It described the rules and handed me a pile of files.

That response did not end the request. It told me how to write the next one.

People come to me all the time and say, “I need an FOIA.” In Florida, they mean a Chapter 119 public records request. They ask for a template because they think the right one-page form unlocks the government. Here is the secret ticket to every wrongdoing ever recorded, plus the keys to Area 51.

That is not how it works.

I filed Item 2g thinking I had built a binary. Show me the residency check, or tell me no record exists. Clay found the third answer, and the third answer is the one nobody plans for.

So you revise. Smaller. Then smaller again. You keep cutting until the district has only two moves left, and both of them are on the record. The first request is not the request. It is the thing that shows you how the agency stores its records, how staff read your language, and where they found room to walk sideways. A template cannot read that. It cannot see the third door.

This repeats, and it drags. Most bad requests ask for “any and all records related to” a large subject, which is a grenade tossed into a records warehouse. The agency searches every shelf, hands you a haystack, and bills you for the time it took to build it.

I do not want the haystack. I want Clay to hand me the needle. I am lazy that way.

Anybody can play guitar. Not everybody is Eddie Van Halen.

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The next request will ask Clay to identify the exact file, page, column, or database field showing that it checked the objector. It will also ask Clay to name the retention schedule item covering that kind of record. A schedule item does not prove any particular record was made. It shows whether the district ever contemplated keeping one. If Clay cannot point to a location and cannot name a schedule item, the district can say in writing that no responsive record exists. No warehouse search is needed.

Clay also sent me a price for the records it had not produced:

Purchase Order Cost Estimate: 15 personnel hours x $51.88 = $778.20
Email Cost Estimate: 3 personnel hours x $35.85 = $107.55
Calendar Dates Cost Estimate: 2.5 personnel hours x $35.85 = $71.70
TOTAL COST ESTIMATE = $957.45

The district wants payment in full before it starts the remaining work. It also warned that it will close the request if I do not respond or pay within 30 days. Clay’s letter cites no statute for that deadline. I asked for the policy that created it.

Nearly $1,000.

Yeah, fuck off.

Then I ran the numbers. Fifteen hours at $51.88 is $778.20. Three hours at $35.85 is $107.55. Two and a half hours at $35.85 is $89.63. Clay billed $71.70, which is two hours. The $957.45 total matches the two-hour figure, not the line item printed above it. The district demanded payment in advance under a number that contradicts its own worksheet.

The purchase order search alone costs $778.20, or 81% of the bill, and none of it touches residency. Florida law allows an agency to bill for extensive clerical time. I do not need to accuse Clay of inventing an illegal fee. I need to stop asking Clay to do work that will not answer my first question.

So I am cutting the purchase orders. I am cutting the $71.70 calendar search. I am shrinking the email request to two staff accounts and six search terms over ten months. At this stage, I only want the sender, recipient, date, and subject line. If one message matters, I can ask for that message later.

Five thousand pages can tell you nothing. One database field can show whether the district followed its own rule.

I am not a librarian.

Librarians know books. I am a goddamn public records expert. That should be a useful partnership. They know what disappeared from the shelves. I know how to make the district account for what happened next.

They do not have to like me. Clay still has to answer the request.

PEN America tracks this. William Johnson runs their Florida office out of Miami Beach, and he is the sharpest person I have talked to on this beat. Pleasant, too, which is not something I say often. He told me once he wanted to find a way to work together. He also told me that if it is not the written word, it is outside PEN’s swim lane. I respect the discipline. Focus is why they are still standing while everyone else chases the news cycle.

Here is where the lanes touch. PEN counts the books that came off the shelves. I make the district produce the paperwork behind the removal.

Mr. Johnson, I am waving. One eye on the phone. Let’s hold Clay County accountable.

This week, I turn 62, of all the goddamn numbers. I spent years working in information technology, then age and AI helped push me out of the market. Now I am using AI to claw my way back into the same market it helped close.

Everything I publish stays free. Paying does not unlock a private chat room, a bonus essay, or a tote bag. It pays for records, certified mail, hosting, and the time needed to read what the government sends back.

If you believe that work has value, fund the next request. If you do not have money, send this story to a reporter or introduce me to someone who can hire me. Send a gift card. Take my dogs around the block. Pride does not pay records fees.

My reply to Clay will keep every free part of the request open. It will drop the purchase orders, cut the calendar search, and demand the exact location of the record that answers Item 2g.

The last line will read:

I authorize $0 in charges.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

Erin Foley, Records Custodian, BSO

The Broward Sheriff’s Office took six hours and eleven minutes to finish a twenty-eight part public records request.

On March 20, 2026, at 11:15 in the morning, Records Bureau Director Erin Foley attached four files to my request. Around 5pm, a staff member pushed three of them to the portal. 30 minuts later, the request was closed and marked finished.

Nothing to see here, move the fuck on.

What I got: a page of gym rules, a blank waiver form, and a Word document dated March 11. I filed on March 9. Somebody wrote that third document two days after I asked, and it was handed back to me as a public record. The question I had asked was who holds a key card to a building the county owns. None of the three documents answers it.

I did not know any of this for four months, because the file was marked closed. Didn’t know this, was I was blocked from their records portal.

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Four months

Their portal keeps a log. Every time anybody touches a request, staff or public, the software writes down what they did and stamps it to the second. Nobody drafts that log. Nobody edits it. Nobody reads it before it goes out the door.

I could reach the portal. I looked at my request. It said closed.

So I did what any reasonable person does when a government office puts in writing that your request has been fulfilled and the screen agrees with them. I waited. I had eight other requests running at this agency. A closed ticket does not ask you for anything.

From March 20 to July 27 the log shows almost no staff activity on my file. One hundred twenty-nine days.

There was also a stretch in July when I could not log in at all. I tried a browser I never use. I cleared the cache. I moved to a second computer. I reset the password, and the system confirmed the reset, and then rejected the password it had just confirmed.

On July 22 I wrote to Foley and listed every step. I opened the email this way: “Recognizing that I’m not well received in all quarters of your agency, I wish to indicate I’m not wasting your time, nor mine, with this request.”

Read that again. That is a citizen apologizing in advance for asking a government office to help him log into their website. I wrote it because I have covered this agency for years and I know what my name does inside that building.

The next morning Foley relayed her technician’s answer. Use an alphanumeric password. No special characters. Delete every password reset email you have received, or move them to a different folder in Gmail.

A public records system that cannot cope with a punctuation mark. That is the front door to the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

On July 26 I sent a formal notice that the response was inadequate and that I was prepared to go to court. Foley opened my file the next day.

Four months of silence. One lawyer letter. Next-day service.

Thirty-five minutes on July 30

Everything below is from their own log, timestamped to the second, and from emails BSO sent me.

12:17:02 p.m. Foley reopens the request. The software writes a note in the comment field: “Recalculated Required Completion Date upon Reopen.” My due date, which had been March 19, becomes July 28.

12:17:04 p.m. Two seconds later the software closes the request again on its own.

12:17:47 p.m. Foley attaches six contracts.

12:18:33 p.m. Forty-six seconds later she deletes two of them.

12:33:01 p.m. She reopens the request a second time. The software writes the same note again. “Recalculated Required Completion Date upon Reopen.” My due date changes a second time, now to March 18, a date that had come and gone four months earlier. My file now carried a deadline that expired before the day they set it.

12:33 p.m. She sends me a status sheet listing every part of my request. Five items on it read “Pending.” The sheet is so carelessly assembled that the entire list appears twice in the same email.

12:38 p.m. I email the Sheriff’s general counsel and copy Foley. “Four months, no records. Limited reasonable delay, and all that jazz. Can someone explain the holdup?”

12:51 p.m. I write again. “Might I inquire why this records request was closed, when many were/are still pending? Once again, I place no ill will at your feet.”

12:52 p.m. Foley answers.

She was telling the truth. At 12:52 p.m. the request was open. She had opened it nineteen minutes earlier, at 12:33.

I asked why it had been closed. She told me it was not closed. Both statements are accurate and only one of them is responsive.

It had been closed since March 20. On May 15 at 11:20 a.m., Foley set the status herself, by hand, to “Closed - Released (No Redactions).” Their software logged the word Reopen twice that afternoon, in her own actions, sixteen minutes apart. You cannot reopen what was never closed. The system knows the difference even when the email does not.

And then she told me to refresh my screen.

In 1996 I built the website for a little company called Disney.com. That same year I built one for another small outfit called Blockbuster.com. I have been doing this for thirty years. My screen was fine. My screen was showing me exactly what Erin Foley had entered into her own system.

Perhaps.

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What a court threat produces

Between July 28 and August 17, eleven documents entered my file for the first time.

Contracts with two private medical companies operating inside a county-owned building. One executed February 7, 2025. Another executed April 2, 2025. Facility rules dated August 2, 2024. A visitor sign-in list running 2,973 rows, with entries reaching back to August 4, 2024.

Every one of those documents existed before I filed. They were signed, printed, scanned, and stored. They were not in litigation, not exempt, not redacted, not hard to find. They sat in an agency that had told me in writing my request was finished.

Nothing produced them for one hundred twenty-nine days. A single letter mentioning court produced all of them in three weeks.

The log also records three files permanently deleted from that request’s recycle bin between July 30 and August 1, after I served notice. Two of them had never been sent to me. Neither one carried an exemption claim. I have asked what they were and under what schedule they went. That question is pending.

Then they charged me to see the rulebook

In late July I asked the Sheriff’s Office a separate question. Show me the written rule that says how you set fees. What is the rate, how do you calculate it, and what counts as “a lot of work”?

On July 31 Foley sent me a bill. Four hundred dollars, spread across eight of my requests at once, eight hours at fifty dollars an hour, payable before anyone lifted a finger.

One of the eight requests they billed me for was the request asking about the billing.

I did not pay. On August 4 I cut everything down to four items that already existed on their shelves. On August 24 at 1:56 p.m. Foley produced all four and never mentioned the four hundred dollars again. The price was four hundred dollars in July and zero in August, and nobody has explained the difference.

The fee rule, when it finally arrived, contains no fee. A policy manual dated October 2024 and a twenty-six page rulebook dated April 2026, signed by Foley, and neither one names a dollar figure anywhere. The rulebook does say that when a job runs fifty dollars or more, the office collects half up front. Half. They asked me for all of it.

Their written threshold for the kind of work that triggers a charge is fifteen minutes.

That is the machine. Fifteen minutes of staff time converts a constitutional right into a purchase, the price is set by a number that appears in none of their published rules, and the invoice arrives before the search does.

Why any of this matters

My partner asked me why this matters. It is a key card. It is a gym. In the scheme of things it is a piece of driftwood, and if you are a regular member of the public your only remedy is to sue, and who has ten or twenty thousand dollars to hand a lawyer because a records clerk closed a ticket. She is right about all of it. And somewhere in the comments a man is typing that I should get a life, and he is not entirely wrong either.

Andy Maurodis taught me the first half of this business. City document equals public document. Here is the other half he taught me.

If I cannot trust you on the little things, I cannot trust you on the big things.

That is the whole argument. Not the key card. The key card is nothing.

Consider what this agency does when it is not answering me. It investigates its own deputies. It holds the body camera footage from every shooting in this county. It holds the dispatch logs and the internal affairs files and the evidence room inventory. When a family sues over a death in custody, the records that decide that case are sitting in the same building, run by the same office, under the same manual, with the same fifteen-minute rule and the same closure button.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office is the agency that handled Parkland. When the next one comes, and there is always a next one, the public will file for those records and it will be this unit that answers.

So ask the small question and see what it buys you. Six hours and eleven minutes to finish twenty-eight items. A memo written after I asked, handed back as a record. Four months of nothing until a lawyer letter. A ticket closed, reopened, closed by software, and reopened again inside sixteen minutes. A due date backdated four months. Three files purged from the recycle bin days after I served notice. A four-hundred-dollar invoice for the rulebook that explains invoices, waived without comment the moment I made it small enough to be embarrassing.

None of that is a hard case. It is a gym roster.

If that is what this office does when the stakes are a key card, I am not prepared to take its word on a homicide file. Neither should you be. The blue line does not announce itself. It shows up as a slow queue, a closed ticket, a fee you cannot pay, and a very polite email suggesting the problem is your browser.

Pardon me, but fuck right off.

I still do not know who holds a key card to that building.

Why I am telling you this

I write every request so that any answer is useful. Produce the record and I have the record. Certify no record exists and I have that in writing forever. Refuse, and the refusal is the document.

I keep requests separate so they cannot be bundled into one invoice. I give exact date ranges. I name the office that holds the file. I never ask a question, because a question buys you an opinion. I ask for a record, because a record is a thing they are obligated to hand over.

And I always ask for the status log, because it is the only document in the file that reports what an agency did instead of what it decided to say.

None of this required a conspiracy. It required a closed ticket and the reasonable expectation that a man will get tired. That expectation is correct almost every time. It is the operating assumption of every records office in this state, and it is not written down anywhere, because it does not have to be.

I have done this in Broward County for about thirty years with no newsroom, no legal department, and nobody paying me to keep going.

To Foley I said it plainly on July 30 and I will say it again here. I place no ill will at her feet. She answers a phone, works a queue, and signs the manual somebody handed her. The Broward Sheriff’s Office is not a records clerk. It is Gregory Tony’s agency, it is his name in the footer of every email I have quoted, and the culture that closes a twenty-eight part request in six hours and eleven minutes did not originate at the counter.

I teach this to city attorneys as CLE faculty for IMLA. I also build records requests for law firms through Sufficient to Show, for people who need the paper and do not have five months to spend learning why they did not get it.

Five items on the sheet Foley sent me at 12:33 that afternoon read “Pending.” Three of them still do.

Pending is a status. Finished was a claim.

Press play. Tick.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

Flock builds the license plate cameras bolted to poles all over your town. They photograph every car that passes and keep a record. Or so we assume, and more about that in a moment.

There are more than a hundred thousand of them out there now.

Almost every story you’ve read about these cameras is about a cop misusing the search. Running an ex. Tracking a woman. That’s real, and it’s ugly. But it’s all about the front of the machine.

I went around back.

I’ve spent most of my life filing public records requests. I’m also a software engineer. So I don’t ask these systems to behave. I test them.

We nerds call it fuzzing. You send the system something it isn’t ready for and watch what happens. If a box is built to take a number from 1 to 10, you throw a 50 at it. Or lob a grenade. Then you see what breaks loose.

Here’s one I found.

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Take A Seat

The custodian answered honestly

These cameras have a feature that lets a police administrator take a plate and switch off its alerts. Put a car on the list, and it stops setting off the system. I asked a Florida police department about it, and the records custodian answered straight.

He told me the feature is real. Then he told me something I hadn’t asked. When a plate comes off that list, nothing gets recorded. No note. No time. No name. It just disappears, and the system keeps no memory it was ever there.

Oh, really. As a software developer, the one thing you always log is a deletion. That’s the sensitive move. And here it leaves no trace.

But that’s not the part that stopped me.

He answered honestly about his screen. He never said his screen shows everything.

The oblivious operator

Think about how enterprise software at scale like this is built. There’s the version the customer sees, the police department’s login. And above it, there’s almost always a second layer the vendor keeps for itself. Somebody at ALPR HQ has to be able to fix your system when it breaks at two in the morning.

The cop at the keyboard can only tell you about the layer he can see. Ask him what’s above it and he’d shrug, and he’d be telling the truth. He doesn’t know. It’s not his to know.

So the question I’m chasing isn’t about the cop. It’s this. Somewhere at Flock’s offices in Atlanta, is there a master control panel? One that lets a support engineer reach down into any town’s system and change what it records? Switch a plate so it never gets logged. Switch a camera so it goes quiet. A stealth mode, run from headquarters, that the police using the cameras would never see.

I don’t know. That’s the honest answer. Nobody has asked. That’s the whole point of fuzzing the fuzz.

I’m not saying it exists. I’m not saying anyone’s using it. I’m saying it’s a fair question, and in all the years these cameras have been in the news, nobody has put it. So I did.

We know they can reach in

This isn’t me guessing in the dark. We already know the vendor can reach into a town’s cameras, because it happened and it got caught.

In a suburb outside Atlanta, a resident pulled records showing a Flock executive had logged into Dunwoody’s camera network and pulled up a live feed. A second employee did the same thing months earlier. A regular person with a records request found it.

So the reaching-in is real. What we don’t know is the ceiling. Looking at a camera is one thing. Changing what the system writes down is a much bigger thing, and nobody has shown that Flock can or can’t do it.

That executive got caught because he came in through the front door, the same login the police use, which keeps a log. But a private control panel at headquarters wouldn’t have to use that door. A separate system doesn’t have to write to the town’s log at all. So the fact that nobody’s found a record of it means nothing. You can’t catch what the system was never built to record.

You cannot check a system using only the tools that system hands you.

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I Have The Time and Tech.

The method and the templates are free, and if you have the time you should take them and file. The Campaign is for the other case. Three rule-anchored requests drafted and filed against the agency you name, every stall answered in writing, every citation checked against primary text, and a comparison of the three documents at the end. Ninety days, $1,500.

Run It With Me

Three questions anybody would ask

So I filed. Not for anybody’s plate. I filed for three plain things.

One. Can someone at Flock reach into your system without you knowing? I’m not asking for secret code. I’m asking what the contract says the company is allowed to do inside the town’s account, and what the town was told in training. That paperwork sits in a government file. It’s public.

Two. If a plate or a camera got switched off, would your records even show it? Not did it happen. Could it show up at all. Does the log have a line for an outsider making a change, or doesn’t it. If it doesn’t, a change like that would leave no mark, and nobody at the department would ever see it.

Three. Has anyone outside the company ever checked? Not the town, which only sees its own screen. Not Flock, checking itself. Somebody independent. If the answer is that nobody has ever looked, that’s not a small thing. That’s the whole story.

Why Atlanta

Flock’s headquarters sits right inside the Atlanta Police Department’s turf. The city got its cameras through a donation routed by a private foundation, so the company that sells the cameras handed them to the department that’s supposed to keep watch on them. And right now the city is running a thirty-day review of the whole program, which means the paperwork is being written this week. That’s exactly when you file. Not after everyone’s had time to tidy up.

And I’ve filed FOIAs with the Atlanta PD and Fulton County Sheriff.

What I’m not telling you

I have no proof a master panel exists. None. What I have is one town’s written word that a delete leaves no trace, proof that the vendor can reach into a system, and a simple truth that nobody has asked what sits on top. Three questions, and no law protects the answers, because nobody ever expected a person to ask them.

Every answer is a finding. If they tell me the town sees everything and no outsider can touch it, good, I’ll print that and say so by name. If they tell me they don’t know, then a major police department just admitted it can’t account for what runs on its own cameras. There’s no version where the answer is nothing.

That’s the method. Find the decision somebody made. Work out what paperwork has to exist if they did it right. Then ask in a way where every answer tells you something.

It’s not about cameras. It’s about forcing a system to account for itself in writing.

I teach this. The method is free, and it always will be. Go file one yourself.

How to file your first public records request

The method and its request templates are free, published under a Creative Commons Attribution license, and attribution is the only string attached.

• Must Exist Campaign — run the campaign with me →

• Must Exist Autopsy — a live class in records practice, not law →

• Read the case files on Substack →

Stop tweeting at the surveillance state. Start filing against it.

Chaz Stevens is CLE faculty and the founder of REVOLT Training in Deerfield Beach, Florida. He is not a lawyer. This is process guidance, not legal advice.

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At the heart of these debates are a few difficult questions: Does the Constitution protect only popular beliefs, or all of them? If the government opens the door for one form of religious expression, does it have to allow every form? And if not, where does the Constitution draw the line?

Few people have tested those questions more directly than Chaz Stevens.

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Stevens is the founder of the Church of Satanology and a longtime activist who uses satire, publicity stunts, and litigation to challenge what he sees as hypocrisy in how governments apply First Amendment protections.

In this episode, Chaz joins us to talk about those battles, the philosophy behind his activism, and what he’s learned from years of pushing the boundaries of the First Amendment.

Non-Legal Advertisement

Florida coughed up 23,000 records and rewrote a law because I asked the state to run its own book-challenge statute against the Bible. Statute 1006.28. Their rules, their form, their signature.

And, Florida’s governor blamed me by name for it.

No newsroom. No lawyer on retainer. No grant. A laptop, a lab by the name of Scooby-Doo, and a filing cabinet full of documents governments wish they had never written down.

About 100 posts in a year: 14.5 million views, 22,000 shares, 8,000 comments. Nobody shares a public records request because it made them emotional. They share it because it worked.

People are jones’ing for a change.

The average Sun-Sentinel story? Maybe 2,500 views, on a good day, and assumes no frozen, falling iguanas or restaurant openings in the article.

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The STEVENS Method, in under fifty words

Find the text. Find the gap between the text and the behavior. File the request that forces someone to write the answer down. Publish the request before the answer lands.

Both outcomes are usable. Production advances the story. Certified absence of a mandatory record is the story.

A ‘no records’ is a perfectly acceptable answer.

That’s the whole thing. Here’s what it does in the field.

Case file: one county, one year

I ran STEVENS on Broward County, Florida. Not because the 954 is special. Because it was in front of me.

BSO posts run the r/Broward subreddit — the county’s main civic forum, moderated by the agency it should be watching.

1. BSO’s secured gym: 2,973 visits over two years. Every single visitor logged as “Guest.” An access log they were required to keep, kept uselessly on purpose. 200,000 views.

2. The Sheriff’s wife has a key to the gym public money built. 119,000 views.

3. Broward’s highest-paid lawman is a sergeant, not the Sheriff. 322,000 views.

These land in a subreddit with 15,000 subscribers. That 322K post was twenty-one times its own audience. Meaning, the post left the sub and sailed through the county on its own. No local outlet, no candidate, no PAC can show you that ratio.

Case file: the vendor in your town

F.U.C.K. Flock — the Fixed Urban Capture Kit. 333,000 views. Then the setting inside Flock’s own system that appears to drop a plate out of detection: 323,000 views, 1,500 shares. Everybody inspects the horse’s mouth. I went around back.

Flock has cameras in thousands of jurisdictions. Yours is probably one of them, under a contract nobody at the meeting read out loud. The request that works in Broward works in your county, because the vendor is the same and the contract is the same.

Florida’s expanded gang-labeling statute, turned around and pointed at the legislators who passed it: 332,000 views.

Are you starting to see a familiar pattern develop?

Case file: it travels

New Britain, Connecticut flies flags for Christians, Greeks, the Irish, and the Caribbean diaspora. I applied for a Satanology flag.

The city deleted its flag policy rather than answer me. 127,000 views.

Different state, different statute, same sequence, same result: a government forced to write down what it actually does.

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We’re fucked, and nobody is coming to help us

In Broward, the Sun Sentinel runs the story and moves on. Dan Christensen at Florida Bulldog does the best investigative work in the county and stays in his swim lane, so the people who already read him already read him. Red Broward hunts corruption (and high fructose corn sweetner), as long as the corruption has a D next to it. The TV stations give you ninety seconds between the sports and the weather, and only if you brought video.

Your county has the same map. A shrinking daily, one good independent, a partisan blog, three minutes of local TV.

Agenda packets dropped at 4:58 on a Friday. Meetings that run past midnight until public comment dies of exhaustion. A clerk who tells you with a straight face that it is not a public record.

Nobody is bringing the heat. So you file it yourself, or it does not happen.

What actually travels

Views are not converts. A million people reading an AMA is not a million people filing a request.

The split shows up in the data. Posts about how I felt withered. Posts that showed the filing ran straight, hot, and true.

Two ways in

Learn to file. REVOLT Training. Live cases, not hypotheticals. Your city, your clerk, your statute.

In Florida that means Chapter 119, Section 286.011, the five-day norm agencies pretend is a suggestion, and 119.12 — the fee-shifting provision that makes the city pay your costs when it stonewalls and loses. Every state has its own version of all four. We find yours and we aim it.

You leave with a campaign, a filing sequence, an escalation ladder, and a press angle.

Not a workshop. A war room.

25 seats. $59. Every first and third Thursday.

Visit REVOLT Training to learn more

Or send me in. One rule: you bring the hunch, I bring the paper. Contracts, access logs, invoices that don’t add up.

Bring a document, or a specific record you believe exists. No document, no case.

Fourteen million people did not show up for my opinions. They showed up for the paper.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.

Suppose you want to buy 138 police officers.

This is not a normal thing to want. Normal people want a medianoche. But suppose you are Broward County, and you have been renting your airport cops from Sheriff Gregory Tony for a while now, and you have started to wonder what exactly you are renting them for.

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And holy smokes, talk about them there late fees.

On August 21 the sheriff posted a graphic on social media to help you think this through. Left column, $146 million, 125 BSO employees. Right column, $232 million, 138 new police officers. Between them, a yellow VS., the kind that sells tickets to a fight.

Tony vs. Stevens. I spot him three rounds and he still goes down in the fourth, jumping over boxes that ended up in the ring, planking in midair, dancing to Kung Fu Fighting on the way to the canvas.

Tony posts videos of himself jumping over boxes and throwing punches at the same time, mitt work, the whole routine. Who fights like that? It’s angry jazzercise.

Is he clearing rooms at The Container Store?

It would also be a decent test of the taxpayer money we spent on a boxing coach. Here’s a thought: fire Al Dundee and hire some Brazilian street fighters. If you want to kick some ass, stop doing tai chi.

But, I digress, shall we continue?

There is an asterisk on the right column. Shades of Roger Maris! The asterisk says that number leaves out extra personnel and other costs. There is no asterisk on the left column, because the left column is perfect and was carried down from a mountain.

Moses (played by Mel Brooks) proudly tells the crowd, “The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen...” He drops and shatters one of the three stone tablets on the rocks. Without missing a beat, he holds up the remaining two tablets and shouts, “Ten! Ten commandments for all to obey!”

The study behind the graphic cost the county close to $100,000. Tony’s post says the numbers tell a clear story.

Nobody has read it.

Not the public. Judging by Steve Geller, not the commissioners either. Geller did twenty in the Legislature, ran the Senate minority, and practices law, which is to say he knows a conclusion without paperwork. He asked how the county is supposed to trust a report it has not seen.

Props to him for thinking, but not dropping, a WTAF from the dais.

Now some math, which I promise will be brief and which I promise will hurt.

$232 million minus $146.4 million is $85.6 million. In May the Sun Sentinel reported that Jensen Hughes put the cost of leaving BSO above $85 million over four years. Same number. The graphic is a four-year total.

The graphic never says four years.

Four years is how long it takes to build a police department out of nothing, and building a police department out of nothing means buying, in no particular order: cars, radios, a building to keep the cars near, academy seats, donuts, badges, holsters, the little clips that hold the badges, more donuts, evidence lockers, a property room, a lock for the property room, a key for the lock, a guy to sign for the key, did I mention donuts?, a second guy to confirm the first guy signed, shoulder patches nobody has drawn yet, the artist who draws the patch, Patch Adams, the committee that rejects the patch, the second artist, signing bonuses to pull cops off other agencies’ payrolls, and a second round of signing bonuses when the first round takes the money and goes back to Sunrise. Stack all of that into one column and you get a number that reads like a ransom note. Year five costs something else. Year five is a normal year with normal payroll and no patch committee.

The post does not mention year five.

Opa!

The two columns also do not buy the same thing, which the yellow VS. would prefer you not dwell on. The left column buys 125 people. The right column buys 138. That is thirteen additional human beings for $85 million, or, a guess here, $6,584,615.32 per person (donuts not included), which explains the traffic on Broward. At those prices the County should stop hiring cops and start breeding them.

The headcount, meanwhile, has been drifting around like a shopping cart in a parking lot. County Auditor Bob Melton counted 123 positions in April 2024, at about $29 million for fiscal 2023. In May, Tony told commissioners the $232 million covered 125 police officers. By August the graphic said 125 employees. The denominator depends on the week you ask.

Here is where the asterisk gets interesting, and I understand that is not a sentence anyone has ever wanted to read. Tony’s own text lists what the study left out of the new agency: administrative staff, SWAT, bomb squad, investigations, specialized services. None of that sits inside the $146 million either. It lives in BSO’s general budget, which every Broward taxpayer already funds through the millage.

PS SWAT has the most bad-assed of TV-theme songs.

So the graphic charges the county for the bomb squad twice. It’s a bomb BOGO! Once at the airport, once at 2601 West Broward. One bomb squad is expensive. Two bomb squads, one of which does not exist, is a man urinating in a bucket and invoicing the county for irrigation.

Melton’s 2024 audit found the Lauderdale airport carried the highest budgeted law enforcement cost per passenger of the airports he surveyed, and that the work has not gone out for bid since ‘96, back when cutting-edge airport communications technology was a pager and a guy running. Melton told WLRN that getting actual spending numbers out of BSO was difficult and sometimes impossible.

Just ask Geller.

The numbers speak for themselves, Tony wrote.

What numbers?

Jensen Hughes concluded that an independent airport police agency is feasible, and that the illustration carries a “financial risk that requires full evaluation.” Project manager Ed Denmark told commissioners in May that more research was needed on cost, staffing, and structure. Alexandra Davis (much more about her in the coming weeks), chairwoman of the Caribbean Mafia, called the move premature. Michael Udine said the cheapest option was not his concern. Nan Rich said it comes down to control of dollars, that the county hands the money over and it is gone.

Tony’s closer says the county awaits a port study and, potentially, a third one on Fire Rescue.

There is one study.

County Aviation hired Jensen Hughes in December 2025 for the airport. This past January, commissioners directed that Port Everglades be added. In April, the Commission passed Item 26-356 adding Broward Sheriff Fire Rescue. Lamar Fisher sponsored it. It passed that day. One contract, three assignments.

The May coverage got the airport. Rafael Olmeda covers courts. Speaking of the previously mentioned parking lots, this reports he appears to have filed from Costco’s, which is a shame, because the January order and the April item were sitting in the agenda packet the whole time.

A message from REVOLT Insights

Sufficient Records Win Before Appeals Begin

Trial records do not assemble themselves. Sufficient Records Engineering identifies missing rulings, weak objections, transcript gaps, and preservation problems before they become appellate failure points. We help litigators build the paper trail courts need: cleaner issues, stronger arguments, fewer surprises, and a record engineered to survive review.

We Can Help

Fire Rescue is not potential. It has been county direction since April 14, four months before Tony typed the word. BSO puts more than $259 million into Fire Rescue in its 2025-26 budget, which is a lot of money to file under maybe.

Fisher’s motion did one more thing. It told the County Administrator to write up how the county would take Fire Rescue back, and to bring that outline to the same meeting where the study was presented. That meeting was May 12. Either the outline exists and nobody spent a minute on a $259 million handoff, or a unanimous order sat in a drawer for four months.

Fisher gave the Herald his reason in April. Under state law a sheriff does not have to say how he spends what the county gives him. The county cannot tell him how to spend it. Direct control would mean knowing what the money bought.

Like say $50K worth of jewelry for outfitting some Denalis in the back lot.

That is Melton’s ‘24 finding, said out loud by an elected official two years later, about the same agency and the same money.

The post is dated August 21. BSO wants $937 million for fiscal 2027, 12% above this year. Tony’s appeal to the Florida Administration Commission over $73 million has a possible hearing on September 15. Florida DOGE sent BSO a letter on May 28 demanding, among much else, the contracts for the salary studies BSO uses when it negotiates with the county and with every city it serves. The response was due June 11.

That salary study is the one Tony calls independent in the fourth paragraph of his post.

Deerfield Beach voted in January to end thirty years with BSO. Pembroke Park left in ‘22. Pompano Beach was advised on March 24 to extend one year and study the question. The airport, the seaport, and Fire Rescue sit inside one consulting contract the public is not permitted to read.

The guy who signs for the key is still standing there. He has been standing there since December ‘25. Nobody has told him what the key opens, because the document that would tell him costs a hundred grand and lives in a drawer.

Main event, September 15, Tallahassee, $73 million. Undercard, 138 police officers who do not exist against 125 who do. Somebody hung a yellow VS. between the columns and left the ticket price off the poster.

Tony has read the study. He built a graphic out of it.

Press play. Tick.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.