Utah Legislator Vows to Fight NSA by Cutting Off Its Water Supply

Step aside, Rand Paul: the NSA has a new enemy. While the Kentucky senator announced his own class-action lawsuit against the NSA on Wednesday, Marc Roberts, a first-term Republican lawmaker in Utah, is planning to introduce legislation that will choke the water supply at the NSA data center under construction in the state.

The Utah 4th Amendment Protection Act, which was propelled by a campaign by the Tenth Amendment Center, would ban state support, participation or assistance to any federal agency that collects data without a search warrant “that particularly describes the person, place and thing to be searched and seized.

” That language is targeted directly at the NSA and its new $1 billion building in Bluffdale, Utah, which would use a whopping 1.7 million gallons of water a day to cool the computers being used to spy on Americans.

“If you want to spy on the whole world and American citizens, great, but we’re not going to help you,” the Bastiat-quoting Rogers told the Guardian on Wednesday.

There has been a recent influx of legislation seeking to use this novel procedure to restrict the power of the NSA. 

Earlier this week, Maryland legislators proposed a similar bill to turn off the lights at the NSA data center being constructed at Fort Meade, which would guzzle 5 million gallons of water per day. 

California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Indiana, Mississippi, and Washington state have all introduced measures to restrict the NSA’s basic necessities, while other state are looking to prevent NSA data being shared without a warrant. If they can't shut down the feds, they will try to make life very complicated for them.

But taking down the NSA by turning of the spigot isn’t a promising option just yet. A 4th Amendment Protection Act in Mississippi recently died, and Roberts tells the Guardian that he is still searching for co-sponsors among the state's conservatives, many of whom herald the new NSA data center as economy-boosting.