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I wish you wouldn't phrase your questions like that as it invites some to accuse you of implying that it's either the US spies on everybody or ends all foreign

• rdl 13y ago
  The argument is that all meaningful communications (outside military tactical, and even there, a lot of it) is moving to the Internet. Without applying SIGINT to the Internet, you essentially can't have meaningful foreign SIGINT capability anymore. It's very difficult to distinguish between foreign and domestic parts of foreign-origin threats, and even more so on the Internet, at collection time. (Even worse, as the transport security part gets better, you either need to add a bunch of active-attacker MITM or somehow compromise endpoints. At some point, even if you thought purely passive SIGINT collection was fine, the level of prior restraint on service providers/developers becomes absurd and probably no one would support it; witness the key escrow crypto wars of the 1990s.) Generally NSA seems to put a good amount of effort into minimization post-collection. But, that only works if you trust them to be 1) forever competent and 2) forever equally ethical.