California has a New Plan to Fight Back Against the NSA: Cut Off Their Water Supply

Nobody really likes the NSA.

That nosy organization that listens to our phone calls, documents our personal data, and compiles reams of “evidence” against nearly everyone in the country is the ugly redheaded stepchild of America. They have no respect for the American people and no regard for privacy. Their assault on our privacy was even backed up by a federal judge recently.

So, if the NSA cannot be defeated in a court of law, we will have to use a different method to fight back.

Throughout military history, attacks on the water supply have been used to intimidate, cause drought, and cause death. And now, two senators in California have proposed this as a way to keep the NSA out of their state.

Senate Bill 828 was introduced on Monday, and if passed, it would ban utility companies in California from supplying services to the NSA.

Considering all of the computers needed to snoop through every facet of our lives, a lack of water to cool them would be an enormous problem, effectively incapacitating them in a matter of days.

Hitting back at the federal government after a mountain of recent allegations of outright violations of its citizens’ rights, senators Ted Lieu (D) and Joel Anderson (R) formally introduced Senate Bill 828 on Monday.

They declared in a statement that “The National Security Agency’s massive level of spying and indiscriminate collecting of phone and electronic data on all Americans, including more than 38 million Californians, is a direct threat to our liberty and freedom.”

The bill will prohibit the state of California from “Providing material support, participation or assistance in any form to a federal agency that claims the power, by virtue of any federal law, rule, regulation or order, to collect 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.”

In practice this means a number of things: The bill targets government-owned utilities (water and electricity); any public universities that allow their facilities to be used as NSA research facilities and their campuses as recruiting grounds; it will also impose sanctions on any corporations trying to fill the gaps left by the utility providers and other state companies; finally, the bill also seeks to ban any local or state criminal investigations from carrying out their work using data harvested by government snooping without a specific warrant. In its absence, the information will simply be inadmissible in court.

With regard to Monday’s proposal on California, Lieu believes that “state-funded public resources should not be going toward aiding the NSA or any other federal agency from indiscriminate spying on its own citizens and gathering electronic or metadata that violates the Fourth Amendment.” (source)

If this bill passes, we can expect to see other states following suit. If we can’t shut down the NSA, perhaps we can hobble their efforts and make them completely ineffective.