Thing is, if MILLIONS were to do it, the govt would be swamped and unable to do anything about it.
In the Fifties and Sixties, Citizens Band radio was a heavily moderated and regulated civilian radio service.
You had to have a license to use it and the FCC practiced fairly strict monitoring in most parts of the country.
I remember seeing the vans and station wagons with the antenna farms and the RDF loops on them with the FCC logo on the doors.
"Uncle Charlie", we called them.
Then the movie "Convoy" hit the theaters and suddenly the CB radio craze was on in full swing. Then Burt Reynolds and that cutie pie Sally Field made it even more popular. Now even the girls thought it was cool.
First they tried getting rid of the 35 dollar license application fee, just mail in your application for free and get your license.
It did no good whatsoever, twenty-seven million people wanted to yell
"Breaker One-Nine good buddy"into their microphones and they weren't going to wait for two months for their stupid piece of paper.
The FCC GAVE UP, and eliminated the licensing altogether. They don't even bother sending Uncle Charlie around unless the violator is so bad that a hundred people or more are complaining, and even then it's not likely they are going to invest more than an hour's effort.
People are running around with "foot warmer" linear amplifiers putting out anywhere from 50 to 500 watts and not encountering any problems. The regulated legal output of a CB radio is FOUR WATTS on AM and twelve watts on sideband.
Even the ham radio bands are pretty much unregulated these days. The hams themselves try to do what they can to keep things running smoothly, but go ahead and tune in to 147.435 mHz and tell me how "regulated" that repeater sounds to your virgin ears.
For those of you outside Los Angeles, here's the live stream:
K6MWT 147.4350 MHz Los Angeles Renegade Repeater - Live Audio Feed Web Player
My point is, as long as only a small handful of do gooders are daring to leave water in the desert, the Feds will have a field day.
But if it gets to the point where they're dealing with a hundred folks a day doing the same thing, there's no way they can handle that much civil disobedience effectively.
And God help them if a hundred people start digging wells or putting in airwell water harvesters.