Activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched the 135-foot thermal airship early Friday morning to protest the agency's mass surveillance programs and to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, a website that rates members of Congress on their support or opposition to NSA reform. The full message on the blimp reads "NSA: Illegal Spying Below" along with an arrow pointing downward and the Stand Against Spying URL.

"We thought it would be fun to fly an airship around the Utah data center, which in many ways epitomizes the NSA's collect-it-all strategy," says Rainey Reitman, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We wanted to have a way to symbolize that our movement is getting quite confrontational with NSA surveillance in a visceral way."