Activists Release Public Domain Image of the NSA's Utah Data Center

Parker Higgins
Electronic Frontier Foundation

When EFF joined with a coalition of partners to fly an airship over the NSA’s Utah Data Center, the goal was to emphasize the need for accountability in the NSA spying debate. In particular, we wanted to point people to our new Stand Against Spying scorecard for lawmakers. But while we were up there, we got a remarkable and unusual view.

Today, continuing in the spirit of transparency and building on earlier efforts to shed some light on the physical spaces the US intelligence community has constructed, we’re releasing a photograph of the Utah Data Center into the public domain, completely free of copyright and other restrictions. That means it can be used for any purpose—copied, edited, or even sold—online or in print, with or without attribution to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We hope that making such an image available will help support conversations about the actions of the NSA.

The image below is just a preview—click through for the full high-resolution version.

This picture makes clear the scope and scale of the NSA’s facilities—necessary because of the agency’s “collect it all” posture and misguided dedication to creating ever-larger haystacks in pursuit of needles. Alongside our other efforts to bring accountability to massive NSA spying, hopefully this image can help make the infrastructure of that spying more tangible to the public.

The fine print: this image is released into the public domain under the terms of the CC0 waiver from Creative Commons. It is available from eff.org and the Wikimedia Commons.

To the extent possible under law, Electronic Frontier Foundation has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this photograph of the NSA Utah Data Center.

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