Protesters Launch Blimp Above New NSA Center

The NSA has this new facility out in Utah that cost you, the taxpayer, ONE AND A HALF BILLION DOLLARS. Ouch! What they are supposed to do with it, I don't know, since most of their mass surveillance programs are under question after a Mr. E. Snowden (now in Russia) started talking about their escapades. Anyway, the place is pretty big, around a million-square-feet. That's about six times the size of a Wal-Mart Superstore (179,000 sq. ft.). 

Well, nobody is going shopping at NSA, but the place has attracted something else, a massive 135-foot Greenpeace blimp that's now hovering about 1,000 feet directly over the center, with a big arrow and the words NSA ILLEGAL SPYING BELOW printed on its side for everybody to see for miles and miles.

I know you're laughing to tears right now so this is where you can have a short moment of silence ....

Activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched the gigantic thermal airship early Friday morning to protest the agency’s mass surveillance programs and to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, a website that rates members of Congress on their support or opposition to NSA reform.

“We thought it would be fun to fly an airship around the Utah data center, which in many ways epitomizes the NSA’s collect-it-all strategy,” says Rainey Reitman, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We wanted to have a way to symbolize that our movement is getting quite confrontational with NSA surveillance in a visceral way.”

The protesters launched the blimp, which is named the AE Bates after a longtime Greenpeace volunteer, at 6 a.m. to capitalize on calm weather.

The stunt was timed, Reitman says, to approximately a year after the political debate on NSA spying began. “Many members of congress have acted as roadblocks or sat on the sidelines of this debate,” she says. “The time had come for us to be very honest with the general public about those who have and haven’t called for NSA reform.”

Greenpeace became involved in the project as a plaintiff in a lawsuit the EFF filed against the NSA last year, which accused the agency of intimidating activists with its mass phone metadata collection programs. Their blimp has made earlier appearances to protest coal-fired power plants in North Carolina, overfishing in the pacific northwest, and the Koch brothers in Southern California. Reitman says they can rest assured the blimp isn't a menacing new surveillance technique. “The only people we’re surveilling with this airship is the NSA.”

By the way, in case you're interested, the Stand Against Spying URL is https://standagainstspying.org/