4 ms·

The strangest thing about recent leaks is how people are shocked that the NSA spies on foreign countries. What are they supposed to be doing?

• insuffi 13y ago
  That is not why the people are shocked. The general mass is shocked(especially foreigners, of course) or rather annoyed about the moral high ground US always seems to take("Chinese are hacking us, we're not hacking them") to which it doesn't own up to.
• malandrew 13y ago
  The biggest difference between the spying in the past and the spying today is that most effective spying usually involved HUMINT. You had to get someone with access to a secure location to go in there and bug the place or you needed a mole on the inside leaking information to you. Today we have an Internet infrastructure that for all intents and purposes is centralized in the US. Lots of network collections pass through the US and many commonly used service providers are in the US. HUMINT is now a lot less important because SIGINT became much much much easier. However abusing the current system for the sake of SIGINT comes at the cost of trust in the current system and architecture. There will be an economic penalty paid by the US of this abuse of trust. At the very least, we're now in a much weaker position to negotiate with the rest of the world when internet governance issues (ICANN for example) come up for discussion.
• coldtea 13y ago
  They are supposed to do it for national security reasons (hence the name, one would presume). On actual enemies or potential enemies. Spying on EU politicians, corporations, trade negotiations and such is not that. It's using spying to get a leverage and exploit/blackmail/bride/take advantage of other countries. Except if you redefine "national security" to mean: each and every way a country can exploit and fuck with other countries.
• Nursie 13y ago
  I'm not shocked. I'm outraged, but it's been obvious that this stuff has been going on for many years. If you didn't know you weren't paying attention.