What the hell are you talking about, of course ethics factors into it! We, as a society, tolerate espionage so long as it is a necessary evil. One of the term

What the hell are you talking about, of course ethics factors into it! We, as a society, tolerate espionage so long as it is a necessary evil. One of the terms in the assessment of "necessary evil" is the ethics of what they are doing, the other term is how necessary it is. If your evil:necessary ratio goes to high then it program stops being something that any reasonable person can support. As an extreme example to demonstrate the point, if the CIA were installing cameras in the showers of randomly chosen UK citizens, that would be wildly unethical and have next to no benefit, thus making it wildly unacceptable. You can't just dismiss ethical criticism of a spy agency by saying "well they operate illegally anyway". Excluding the ethical term would be giving them a license to do anything they please.