The National Security Agency (NSA) has announced plans to use 5 million gallons per day of treated wastewater from Howard County in Maryland to cool its huge Fort Meade data center, which is expected to be completed in 2016.
According to The Baltimore Sun, the NSA will cover the $40 million required to build the needed pump station, and will pay up to $2 million each year for the wastewater that would otherwise be dumped into the Little Patuxent River. The plan is being billed as a money-saving, environmentally conscious effort that officials believe could serve as a model for others.
However, the plan is not without opposition. Critics of the NSA’s controversial surveillance activities are seeking to prevent the plan by lobbying state lawmakers across the country to make it illegal for local governments to provide public utility services to the federal agency. Most recently, a bipartisan team of state senators in California introduced legislation that would ban companies in the state from providing essential services—including electricity and the water needed to cool the NSA’s high performance computer systems—to the agency.
“Maryland is one of the most crucial states in this national campaign,” Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee in Washington, told The Baltimore Sun. “Because Congress has been so abysmally dysfunctional and inactive in the oversight arena for the last 10 years, the municipal checks and balances are really all that we the people have had an opportunity to exercise.”
Buttar and other critics reportedly plan to examine the Howard County-NSA wastewater deal. NSA officials say they have heard no criticism of the plan, which has been ongoing but out of the spotlight for a few years.
