“Blimp Buzzes NSA Data Center
In Anti-Surveillance Protest”

It is quite an extraordinary feat when a protest blimp can sneak up on the $2 billion NSA data center in Utah … and not get chased away by scrambled fighter jets.

One wonders whether the stand-down was actually purposeful, and that there are those within government who are also very unhappy with the degree of spying conducted on innocent US citizens every moment of every day.

As a protest to this unconstitutional, unlawful and unethical conduct systematically perpetrated on the American people, anti-surveillance groups decided to give the NSA a dose of their own medicine. As follows:

Anti-surveillance groups flew over the NSA’s massive Utah data center in a blimp on Friday in a dramatic protest against government surveillance.

Greenpeace, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation and the conservative Tenth Amendment Center sent up a message on a thermal airship for a flying protest above the agency’s $2 billion data center, which critics charge could be used to store nearly limitless amounts of Americans’ private information.

“NSA illegal spying below,” read a message on the blimp, with an arrow pointing straight down to the Bluffdale, Utah center.

“The public needs to be brought into the Congressional debate around surveillance reform happening right now,” the EFF’s Rainey Reitman said in a statement. “We’re flying an airship over the Utah data center, which has come to symbolize the NSA’s collect-it-all approach to surveillance, and demanding an end to the mass spying. It’s time for bold action in defense of our privacy.”

Greenpeace said it offered its blimp for the protest because the NSA’s surveillance also jeopardizes the basic free speech and free association rights of its environmental advocates. The conservative group, for its part, joined the fly-by to show that electronic surveillance is not a partisan issue.[1] 

Can there be any greater threat to the freedoms of the USA than one which monitors your every electronic communication — telephone, email and text message?

Is there a more serious intrusion into your personal life than to have your private photos, letters and secret business data intercepted by some nameless bureaucrats in the US Federal Government’s data-mining center deep in the bowel of the NSA spying complex in Utah?

Clearly, the invasion of privacy, which the NSA spying represents to every resident of the planet who is connected to the internet, ought to be a grave concern.

It has become a HUGE concern to nations like Brazil and India who are now going off the grid — the USA-dominated grid, that is — so that they will not be subjected to such voyeuristic behavior. Those governments know that something can turn up in the process of the illegal NSA spying which could then be used against them. The entire workings of their respective governments can be seriously compromised because of information or data which is revealed through the NSA international spying program.

Likewise, US citizens are vulnerable to the acquisition of similar types of sensitive or compromising material, which the US Federal Government can then use against anybody, anywhere, anytime!

Now that poses an ongoing scenario whereby the Feds can exert coercive power over We The People at will. Can there be a more glaring example of what happened to Donald Sterling? Even though the NSA appears not to be involved, a highly confidential and very private conversation was splashed all over the internet which caused him to be fined $2.5 million, banned from the NBA for life, and the loss of his professional basketball team that he owned for 33 years.

You get the picture — anyone’s private information can be accessed, which can then be used against them now that the NSA has been given access to it.

How do you spell T A C I T _ A P P R O V A L?

Michael Thomas
June 26, 2014
StateoftheNation2012.com

Author’s Note:

Edward Snowden did more to advance the cause of privacy than anyone in recent history.  Through his courageous actions of blowing the whistle on the NSA, he alerted the American people to this patently unlawful spying regime.  Truly, the NSA’s data-mining program represents the clandestine theft of a fundamental constitutional right which cannot go unaddressed.

Now the question is: How will the citizenry respond?

Endnotes:

[1] Blimp Buzzes NSA Data Center In Anti-Surveillance Protest