> Spying on other spying agencies seems like 100% fair game
> This is legitimate activity for the NSA
> I'd be pretty angry at NSA for being incompetent if they didn't spy on foreign intelligence agencies.
Correct. This is what spy agencies do. Edward Snowden is an American Hero, and it is a shame what has happened beyond the obvious. His name is invoked for shock headlines, and at this point there is almost no reaction to these disclosures and that is worrying. If there was a way to lower the power distance between "Government Actors" and citizens, we could expend resources cooperatively instead of competitively.
Until then, there will be numerous government agencies AND companies, on many continents and countries, building systems to collect and analyze your data creating a single point of failure. That sounds counter intuitive, but if we assume all of your data is essentially uniform and the Chinese/NSA/BND etc. all have essentially the same data. If even one of those places has a breach event, your data will be in the hands of bad individual actors. This leaves aside, that the data is already in the hands of questionable players.
To conclude, the Snowden docs were illuminating but no longer hold the shock they once did. Not much has changed. The initial disclosure confirmed for a lot of us what we already knew, and publicized it to those who didn't. The ongoing disclosures are marginal now and really a function of leveraging Snowden's name for ad-traffic. Hopefully, going forward there will be a framework for protecting privacy that regular, everyday people can easily use. Until then, these disclosures are just a disheartening reminder of the inability to seperate gov. tyranny from legitimate activity.
[0]Snowden is living in an undisclosed location in Russia, a country hostile to the US, and barred from entering America without being tried for treason. Disappointing.