> Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO. Aside from phone metadata collection, they weren't spying on Americans. Th

> Hacking private companies and spying on Americans seems outside their charter IMO. Aside from phone metadata collection, they weren't spying on Americans. They could tap communications of non-Americans outside the US, and they could find those communications in Google WAN traffic crossing the US border. It's Google's fault for not encrypting it because any number of other countries with fewer laws against spying on their citizens could have done the same thing. It is good that Google and other Internet companies now use https everywhere and encrypt their WAN traffic, but the threat vector should have been well known at that point given what China had already been doing publicly for years.