WOO HOO EFF & GREENPEACE! Dirigible Hovers NSA DATA CENTER W/Banner 'NSA ILLEGAL SPYING BELOW'

'Illegal spying below': activists launch airship in protest at NSA surveillance

Pair from Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace drift massive dirigible over NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah
Spencer Ackerman in New York

theguardian.com, Friday 27 June 2014 13.42 EDT

Protests against mass surveillance have now taken to the skies above a major National Security Agency installation.

At about 6am local time on Friday, in a field about a mile from Bluffdale, Utah, two activists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched a 135ft airship and drifted the dirigible over the NSA's massive data center there.

With some cars below entering the center's office park, the lighter-than-air vessel hung a banner reading 'NSA illegal spying below' and a web address for a new EFF site grading members of Congress on their surveillance positions.




It was the maiden patrol of the first anti-surveillance activist air force. While the dirigible, known as the AE Bates Thermal Airship, cannot match the aerial panopticon capability of military surveillance tools like the Argus camera suite – which can see an entire city and record literally decades' worth of video daily – few protest groups have thought to capitalize on the migration of military technologies to civilian life.

At Bluffdale, the NSA is creating an enormous amount of storage capacity – said to comprise around 100,000 square feet's worth, at a cost of over $1bn – for its growing troves of ostensibly foreign-focused intelligence data. A year's worth of revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden pointed to, among other things, the deep involvement of the NSA in warrantlessly collecting phone, Internet and other data from Americans; and to the NSA's embedding into the firmament of the global internet.

With civil libertarian groups frustrated over the pace and diminished ambitions of surveillance reform legislation, EFF's banner hanging from the AE Bates advertised a new website it launched to assign members of Congress letter grades for their positions on mass data collection. The website also asks President Obama to "to provide a full public accounting of the intelligence community’s mass surveillance practices."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/surveillance-activists-launch-135ft-airship-nsa#start-of-comments