While Congress dithers, Obama deflects, and the NSA lies outright – some ordinary Americans have come up with a plan to nullify the NSA surveillance state. Cut off the water.
Remember that massive NSA complex being built in Utah? It requires 1.7 million gallons of water a day to keep the servers housing all your stolen data cool. Cut off the water and watch the surveillance state buckle, or at least that’s the thought.
While the facility will feature state of the art technology and security measures, at the end of the day, like any other building, the data center will rely on local utilities, and local opponents want to cut it off from the grid.
Advocacy groups, which have formed the OffNow coalition, are pushing for state legislation that would cut off utilities to the NSA’s new data center being built in Bluffdale, Utah. The argues that the NSA’s electronic snooping violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches and seizures, and proposed state legislation known as the 4th Amendment Protection Act would prevent the local government from supporting the building with local utilities.
The OffNow coalition‘s strategy is hard to dispute. If local utilities refuse to provide the NSA with water the massive surveillance center becomes pretty useless – provided they can’t appropriate water elsewhere.
As far as non-violent resistance goes, this is pretty smart and leads to a deeper question regarding the rogue reactionary elements within the US government. How long can they run things if people refuse to comply? If the surveillance state loses the consent of the governed and people simply refuse to recognize their dubious authority are they as dead as Dixie?
We might get a chance to see firsthand in Utah.