When you talk about spying on people to know everything about them in order to learn how to manipulate them, you're talking about brainwashing. Not the sci-fi concept of literally taking over their mind, but knowing everything, public and private, about someone and using that information to make them behave how you want them to behave is what I mean.

Some politicians also kill their political opponents in order to secure their own political positions of power. This is also a political advantage. How far exactly should we cross ethical boundaries in order to secure these perceived advantages?

I don't see any evidence that spying on people is a battlefield advantage. We already spy on people and we couldn't even stop 9/11. Further these low-tech ISIS-like groups have been successful all around the world even on high alert.

So again, these theoretical advantages aren't amounting to anything, but the consequences couldn't be more apparent. The lack of trust between the governing and governed classes is abysmal. It's damn near impossible to do anything consequential in politics because no one trusts each other. These consequences are astoundingly more real to me than these shadowy threats that somehow are so advanced, yet the real-world attacks are nothing more than low-tech extremists hijacking airplanes with razor blades.