The National Security Agency, already under siege in Washington, faces a fresh attempt to curtail its activities from a Utah legislator who wants to cut off the surveillance agency’s water supply.
Marc Roberts, a first-term Republican lawmaker in the Beehive State, plans this week to begin a quixotic quest to check government surveillance starting at a local level. He will introduce a bill that would prevent anyone from supplying water to the $1bn-plus data center the NSA is constructing in his state at Bluffdale.
The bill is about telling the federal government “if you want to spy on the whole world and American citizens, great, but we’re not going to help you,” Roberts told the Guardian.
Supporters of the bill freely admit they’re at a disadvantage. Roberts is still talking with colleagues to find co-sponsors. His activist allies expect a steep, uphill struggle against the NSA’s supporters in conservative Utah, as well as business groups whom Roberts expects will argue that the data center will create jobs and bolster the local economy.
It will be a “pretty good fight”, said Mike Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center, whose campaign to shut off the spigot at the data center had gained more media attention in recent weeks than traction until Roberts embraced it.
The impending bill also highlights a diffusion of protest against the NSA more than eight months after whistleblower Edward Snowden began revealing the breadth of US and allied surveillance in the Guardian, the Washington Post and other news outlets.
In addition to a congressional effort to end bulk collection and promised curtailments unilaterally offered by President Barack Obama, Utah is the 13th state legislature to consider sanctions on the federal government’s second largest spy agency. The hashtag favored by local activists: #NullifyNSA.
“Ultimately, all three branches of the federal government have grown complicit in a broad-scale assault on the fundamental rights of we, the American people, and the only place we have left to go are the states,” said Shahid Buttar, the executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, an activist group working with the Tenth Amendment Center as part of what they call the OffNow coalition.
