This goes all the way back to ECHELON and Five Eyes. If you look up the ECHELON program, you will find documented evidence of exactly that occurring. There is e

This goes all the way back to ECHELON and Five Eyes. If you look up the ECHELON program, you will find documented evidence of exactly that occurring. There is evidence this and similar programs/agreements has been going on since at least WWII. Even now, it's well-documented and well-understood that all the first-world allied nations have varying degrees of intelligence-sharing relationships with their SIGINT programs. For example, with the NSA, you have the Five Eyes countries, and also Tier 2 countries like Germany. I tihnk what also holds them back a little is also the fact it's amazingly hypocritical for them to complain too much, because every industrialized country is spying on every other industrialized country, allied or not. Of course, some are bigger targets than others. The US is obviously the biggest target, but there's smaller scale stuff going on too, as between France and Germany. According to Germany, France is the "evil empire" of industrial espionage perpetrated in part through their SIGINT programs. The focus on the USA, and the NSA, is misleading. The NSA's role is probably comparable to the US government at large's role in world politics, (biggest, most influential) but all other nations are complicit. I don't intend to sound mean, but I feel like the attitude that so many people had in the wake of the Snowden revelations, that spying on allies was unheard of, unexpected, evil, is breathtakingly naive and historically and contextually unaware, and almost like some kind of twisted expression of the stereotypical American arrogance, that only Americans could commit so great an evil. This is an old, old, old game that has always evolved with technology. I guess I rambled on a bit there. Sorry.