I get the implication but America isn't Russia and they just don't do it, too big of a headache, too easy to blowback into political realm. Officers hate when clandestine work erupts into public political drama.

Plus, why would you hire a team of people to kidnap a citizen and beat them when you can assign a ticket to a government blackhat at the NSA who will run the commands against your devices and take what they need without you ever knowing.

Even then, there is substantial risk of whistleblowing for illegal data collection against citizens (Snowden et al) so they would instead in a clandestine manner ask a fellow member of the Five Eyes to perform the surveillance "legally".

Our society has known about Five Eye roundabout spy agreements for a long time and has largely shrugged, so the risk of public political blowback doing this would be minimal.

I get your point that a highly-motivated attacker has other, less sophisticated, ways of getting to your data.

However, if we're playing poker and I learn your tell, it's in my best interest that you are naive to that fact. While not the best analogy, I would think that the same concept would apply to state actors.

The state actor will have a more difficult time doing that if you are living in a different country. Exploits don't care about borders: https://www.voanews.com/africa/ethiopia-accused-using-spywar...

Much of what NSO Group does is sell to smaller despotic regimes who then use them to spy on dissidents who live abroad and would be quite hard (and embarrassing) to black-bag. Not everyone can send a murder team to Stockholm (or wherever).

Some despotic regimes do have large kidnap-and-murder programs (ex Rwanda) but if you just want to keep tabs on exiled dissidents and learn exactly who they're talking with back home, NSO Group has a product for you.

> How many people actually worry about these spy agencies?

I don't really worry about the spy agencies themselves -- I am not of any interest to them.

However, I worry a lot about the likes of NSO and the tools they produce. They are likely to end up being used, in one form or another, by criminals and corporations.