Comment by trothamel
8 hours ago
So, that's generally not something local governments do in the US. They do things like increasing taxes on data centers, denying water rights, electric interconnection rights, etc. (At least, all of this has been threatened against data centers.)
The US government, and sub-governments routinely exercise control over data centres, typically by the simple act of issuing a subpoena or warrant or weird national security document. They will entirely retain this power. And the power to force compliance with force if they need to (though they typically don't).
Local governments in the US practically never exercise control over data centers by doing any of the things you just discussed. There's a reason why you're saying "this has been threatened". It's a strange new thing resulting from bizarre current behavior - behavior and a resulting trend that started after Elon started talking about space based data centers, and thus cannot be the cause of it.
PRISM[1] has been publicly-documented for over a decade. China, Iran, Russia, among others obviously also intervene in electronic communications at a low level.
I'm not caught up entirely, but I would imagine that NSA's capabilities have advanced beyond what has been published from slides created nearly 20 years ago.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM