There is a FISA court system in place preventing random access to data collected by the NSA. It has to be obtained via warrant, on record, from a judge. Most of

There is a FISA court system in place preventing random access to data collected by the NSA. It has to be obtained via warrant, on record, from a judge. Most of it is metadata (call times, etc) and most of it was collected by cooperating with tech companies. The rumors about widespread NSA infiltration into all of our devices via hacking were greatly exaggerated. The closest you come to that is with the CIA Vault 7 stuff (from WikiLeaks) which as we now know probably came from Russian sources, was probably also exaggerated, and we don't have any proof that it was used outside of targeted operations. It would be dumb for government not to develop tools for dealing with other nation-state hackers. In fact, maybe that's exactly how we can pin attribution to China in this case. I'll repeat my previous position: > [...] surveillance is one issue (which is valid and we should talk about it). Stealing intellectual property using your intelligence apparatus in a way that benefits your state-sponsored businesses is another. We can talk about that too. There is a difference, imo, and we should continue to talk about what China is clearly doing.