Are you implying that people believe the US doesn't have an intelligence community that engages in covert surveillance? In the past few years, the debate seems

Are you implying that people believe the US doesn't have an intelligence community that engages in covert surveillance? In the past few years, the debate seems to have shifted from "What is appropriate oversight and behavior for intelligence agencies" to "Literally all national-level intelligence operations are a crime which must be stopped". The difference between the US and China/Russia is that in theory we have an intelligence community that is answerable for its actions to an elected civilian government. The extent to which that is true is obviously debatable, but to try to draw some equivalency here is absurd.