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 ac

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.