One thing that always bothers me when pointing the finger at US spooks is that we conveniently ignore that there are certainly Russian and Chinese spooks. If yo

One thing that always bothers me when pointing the finger at US spooks is that we conveniently ignore that there are certainly Russian and Chinese spooks. If you were a spook of a geopolitical adversary, one of the most effective things you could do to undermine the US would be to undermine their (hugely powerful) intelligence apparatus. There is a reason a a lot of US-critical media comes out of Russian and Chinese state sponsored media. While it’s true that Russia has been overly scapegoated in some cases, there are also still blatant Russian-owned US “assets” like Tulsi Gabbard and Paul Manafort. And those are just the clumsy obvious ones. Even though the US IC blatantly violates the constitution and our rights as citizens, I do greatly prefer them to Russia or China. They are the least-bad option we have. As far as I can tell, while they violate our right to privacy, they don’t abuse that to violate our rights to freedom of expression or just kill us for dissent. We don’t have the luxury of relying on a larger foreign power to protect us like the other developed countries under our umbrella without such known-controversial intelligence operations.