The National Security Agency depends on huge computers that guzzle
electricity in the service of the surveillance state. For the NSA’s top
executives, maintaining a vast flow of juice to keep Big Brother
nourished is essential—and any interference with that flow is
unthinkable.
But interference isn’t unthinkable. And in fact, it may be doable.
Grassroots activists have begun to realize the potential to put the
NSA on the defensive in nearly a dozen states where the agency is known
to be running surveillance facilities, integral to its worldwide snoop
operations.
Organizers have begun to push for action by state legislatures to
impede the electric, water and other services that sustain the NSA’s
secretive outposts.
Those efforts are farthest along in the state of Washington, where a new
bill in
the legislature—the
Fourth Amendment Protection Act—is a statutory
nightmare for the NSA. The agency has a listening post in Yakima, in the
south-central part of the state.
The bill throws down a challenge to the NSA, seeking to block all
state support for NSA activities violating the Fourth Amendment. For
instance, that
could mean a cutoff of electricity or water or other
state-government services to the NSA site. And the measure also provides
for withholding other forms of support, such as research and
partnerships with state universities.
Here’s the crux of the bill:
“It is the policy of this state to
refuse material support, participation, or assistance to any federal
agency which claims the power, or with any federal law, rule,
regulation, or order which purports to authorize, the collection of
electronic data or metadata of any person pursuant to any action not
based on a warrant that particularly describes the person, place, and
thing to be searched or seized.”
If the windup of that long sentence has a familiar ring, it should.
The final dozen words are almost identical to key phrases in the
Fourth
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
In recent days, more than
15,000 people have signed a petition
expressing support for the legislation. Launched by RootsAction.org,
the petition is
addressed to the bill’s two sponsors in the Washington
legislature—Republican Rep. David Taylor, whose district includes the
NSA facility in Yakima, and Democrat Luis Moscoso from the Seattle area.
Meanwhile, a similar
bill with
the same title has just been introduced in the
Tennessee
legislature—taking aim at the NSA’s center based in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
That NSA facility is a doozy: with several hundred scientists and
computer specialists working to push supercomputers into new realms of
mega-surveillance capacities.
A new coalition, OffNow, is sharing information about model legislation. The group also points to
known NSA locations in
other states including
Utah (in Bluffdale), Texas (San Antonio),
Georgia (Augusta),
Colorado (Aurora),
Hawaii (Oahu) and
West Virginia
(Sugar Grove), along with the NSA’s massive headquarters at
Fort Meade
in Maryland. Grassroots action and legislative measures are also
stirring in several of those states.
One of the key organizations in such efforts is the
Bill of Rights
Defense Committee, where legal fellow Matthew Kellegrew told me that
the
OffNow coalition
“represents the discontent of average people with … business-as-usual
failure to rein in out-of-control domestic spying by the NSA and other
federal departments like the FBI. It is a direct, unambiguous response
to a direct, unambiguous threat to our civil liberties.”
In the process—working to counter the bipartisan surveillance-state
leadership coming from the likes of President Obama, House Speaker John
Boehner, the House Intelligence Committee’s chair Mike Rogers and the
Senate Intelligence Committee’s chair Dianne Feinstein—activists urging a
halt to state-level support for the NSA include people who disagree on
other matters but are determined to undermine the Big Brother
hierarchies of both parties.
“By working together to tackle the erosion of the Fourth Amendment
presented by bulk data collection,” Kellegrew said, “people from across
partisan divides are resurrecting the lost art of collaboration and in
the process, rehabilitating the possibility of a functional American
political dialogue denied to the people by dysfunction majority partisan
hackery.
From another vantage point, this is an emerging faceoff between
reliance on cynical violence and engagement in civic nonviolence.
Serving the warfare state and overall agendas for U.S. global
dominance to the benefit of corporate elites, the NSA persists in doing
violence to the Constitution’s civil-liberties amendments—chilling the
First, smashing the Fourth and end-running the Fifth.
Meanwhile, a nascent constellation of movements is striving to thwart
the surveillance state, the shadowy companion of perpetual war.
This is a struggle for power over what kind of future can be created for humanity.
I
t’s time to stop giving juice to Big Brother.
