Taking it to the next level

14 Feb, 2026

3 min read

In October 2025 we started the Miami Tech Enthusiast Club. In the face of the encroachment on our rights and how technology was being leveraged for that goal, several of us felt like it was time to get organized and start pushing back. An idea that originally was meant for fun needed to be refocused toward community on the one hand and action on the other. For example, we would organize virtual social hours while also doing research on Flock in South Florida. 2025 was the beginning of a digital privacy nightmare that we felt was coming for a long time. So we were going to start hanging out, but we were also going to become informed and push back on the affront to our rights where we could.

At around the same time, a group chat was started on Signal called the "FL Digital Rights Network." The goal of this chat was to connect with people across the state who cared about digital rights, or at least cared about how technology was being used to harm them. Since the chicken came home to roost in so many areas of our lives, people were beginning to feel the effects of having lost so much privacy in the last decade and half. In this chat we could share information on how this happened, what we could do to protect ourselves, how the situation was deteriorating across the West, and how we should stop it.

Many people who joined this chat were activists or organizers for other political causes. Some had a technical background, whether informally or professionally. The most important thing was that now there was a place where people who were concerned about digital rights issues in Florida could talk. We didn't have that before, or at least nowhere that I could find.

With the start of the new year, MTEC found itself on an unexpected side quest - the Florida Legislative Session. While we did know of at least one bill that seemed like an exciting idea, we had no idea of the behemoth challenges we were going to face. The AI Bill of Rights turned out to be an age verification law for using chatbots. And then out of no where we were hit with an even worse bill in the form of the Florida App Store Accountability Act. Both of these bills would tie your real life identity to immense amounts of data to an almost inescapable degree. This was a clear ratcheting up in the erosion of privacy of Floridians, and in line with the onslaught of attacks on our right to privacy from the year prior. We had our hands full with "the worst 60 days of the year" as some call it.

However, our plan had a weakness - namely that our base of operations was too constrained for the message we wanted to get out. Even though this legislation impacts 23 million Floridians, our analysis and campaigns were coming from a club that only seemed to be addressing a tenth of those people. Furthermore, if anyone else wanted to contribute, they would have a hard time parsing that a random tech club miles away was potentially the best source of opposition to the next stage of surveillance, if they even knew about the club or the legislation in the first place!

Therefore, we needed to reorganize and put everything in it's right place. Introducing the Florida Digital Rights Association! We are an advocacy group fighting for digital freedom in the State of Florida while fostering local groups to address local concerns. Now everyone in Florida has a one stop shop to understand how technology and society are mixing in our state. We even lay out exactly what you can take action on. Not only that, but every Floridian now has a starting point for contributing to a fight that is relevant to them!

While we cover issues and opportunities at the state level, we want to support local groups for parts of Florida that don't have such a group. It doesn't have to be as nerdy as the Miami Tech Enthusiast Club, but we want to help anyone who wants to organize locally to be able to do so and have an online platform to start from.

We still have a ways to go. There are decisions to be made and web pages to be set up, as well as legislation to track and news to analyze. We're building the ship as we're sailing. However, things are too urgent to wait for the right moment and have a perfect launch. We chose to bias toward action and start supporting digital rights advocates now. Whether you were in the original group chat or only joining today, we hope you'll come along with us.

PS - MTEC is not going anywhere! We're two separate organizations that have overlapping contributors, like in open source software communities!

Written by Joseph, Organizer

Enthusiast and advocate for digital privacy and cybersecurity, as well as free and open source software. Hobbyist. Wants to see the world get better.