I thought you were talking about seemingly-Wikileak relevant things like secret police stuff, control over national media, poisoning of political enemies, assassinations... Y'know. Boring stuff. Not "egregious" I guess.
How about "secret police stuff" like the illegal abductions of people to put them into torture "black sites" all over the world? [0]
Massive control over global media trough lobbying and propaganda instruments? [1]
A long history of successful, and not so successful assassination attempts aimed at the "ideological opposition" all over the world? [2]
The point here not being that the "US is the worst", the point being that the US hardly has the "moral high ground" on these issues just because they use these methods mostly against external "enemies" and not their own population. Questionable methods are questionable because of their methodology, not because of their targets.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
[2]https://wikispooks.com/wiki/US/Foreign_Assassinations_since_...
You bury it in there ("The point here not being..."), but I think you agree with me. No?
0. People straight up disappeared in Syria, people arrested and locked up for political reasons in Russia - DOMESTIC stuff.
1. (Leaving aside that sock-puppet commenters are not the same as "massive control over global media".) The use on a massive scale of paid trolls by Russia, and the outright censorship of mass media outlets in countries from Russia and China to US allies like Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
2. Assassinations of journalists in Russia, and of some particularly high-value opposition targets abroad.
The US influence on global media extends far further than a mere sock-puppet program which btw predates the notorious Russian "troll factories" by a couple of years. Only very few people know what classified operations are running in addition to that sock-puppet operation, but you can be certain there are more operations like that. Like influencing foreign media trough NGO's [0] in addition to that US media are the dominant news outlets on a global scale.
And again: If you want to complain about assassinations then the US is in no position to point fingers at anybody. Just because the US does conduct these kinds of operations on a global scale mostly targeting foreigners, while being rather successful in suppressing publicity about similar actions on a domestic scale, does not make these actions any "better" or "just". Even the US has no shortage of journalists dying in rather mysterious circumstances, Gary Webb comes to mind and if they don't die under weird circumstances they are straight up put on drone kill lists [1].
I realize this is a matter of "national pride" for many US Americans, to keep the facade of "We are the exceptional good guys, number one in everything!" intact, but as somebody who's seen "both sides" of this I consider that a rather absolute and dangerous view on reality.
Note: Not a fan of using huffingtonpost as a source, but it's the only English-language source I found about this due to it being a rather German-centric issue.
[0] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/till-bruckner/think-tanks-lobb...
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list...
What service do Wikileaks provide to leakers in those cases?
You're now throwing up a diversion by suggesting that surveillance be the only criterion by which to judge a state (or non-state) actor's badness (or goodness).
There is plenty to criticise the US on. I strongly recommend (and have frequently posted to HN) examples such has histories of violence against labour movements, corporate crime generally, the Johnson County War, the West Virginia Coal Wars, and more. There are authors such as Howard Zinn, or Noam Chomsky, or Mark Twain, or Upton Sinclair, or Martin Luther King, Jr., among many others, who can detail atrocities and evil done by and on account of the US.
But, in recent years, the United States hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, made a habit of hunting down and killing its own dissident journalists, politicians, and activists, as Russia has. On which Wikileaks is ... very curiously silent. An action I'll argue is markedly worse than just listening in on conversations, as it takes the value of such surveillance one step further: the acting on it with lethal force.
Has the US managed to kill people? Sure: drone strikes (of questionable validity, but against a generally defined enemy, modulo innocents slaughtered), the killing and subsequent coverup of Reuters photographers in Iraq in 2007 (http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/04/05/iraq.photographers...), the friendly-fire killing and cover-up of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, massive security failures in avoiding the 9/11 attacks.
But consider then, Russia's apparently false-flag attacks on its own people (Moscow apartment bombings), the assasinations already mentioned, Syrian attacks, and more.
And from Wikileaks: an increasingly inexcusable silence.
This from a former defender of Assange, and a current defender of both Snowden and Manning.
Those are all evidence that other parties have secrets.
Off course, we will be sure you're wrong, but please, go ahead. Name a "random poor third world country" that has a military base in one of its neighboring countries. And while you're at it, which one has a base in Kuwait, Turkey, Iraq, Bulgaria, Romania, Djibouti, etc, etc, etc.