But indeed, let's keep using encryption. It is, after all, the US government that has a long history(1) of trying to keep encryption out of our non-American hands.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...
Furthermore, it would be weird if this didn't happen. And if your country, whichever one it is, isn't doing this, and some horrible thing happens which might have been avoided by this kind of spying, then your co-citizens will be rightly outraged and demand to know what the hell your government thinks it is doing.
But, equally, your government might [ought?] to consider what it can do to protect its citizens from foreign spying.
Most wicked in all of this is not that the spying takes place, but that it does so within the most diaphanous of legal frameworks. I understand that my government might want to spy on me if it thinks I'm involved in something illegal, but I damn well want a clear, unambiguous, legal framework that says who gets to authorise that spying, for how long, and on what grounds. Oh, and the person who does that authorisation had better be a judge, or an elected official that I can un-elect.
All this we're-so-clever-because-we-found-a-way-to-subvert-the-law-by-cleve-interpretation nonsense needs to be stopped in a career ending way for those doing it. Oh, and the politicians who gave it a wink and a nod need to be named so we can decide what to do with them at the next election.
In summary, countries spy on foreigners. Always have. Always will. But that doesn't excuse them spying on their own. That kind of behaviour has a bad reputation, for a bunch of historically valid reasons.
I'd like to live in a world where we all were able to assert our rights, as stated most elegantly under the Declaration of Human Rights (1).
Article 7: All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Article 14: (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
Article 19: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
The USA's own Elanor Roosevelt was the Chair of the CHR, which drafted the Declaration, and the US is a signatory. (2)
(1) http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
Now we seem to have this attitude of "Justice for all (multinational) corporations!". Voting the wrong way is terrorism, as far as some of these interests are concerned :-(
Because being openly hostile to foreigners is not very productive in a world where international commerce is important. What happens to all of those "cloud" companies when nobody trusts their bytes to leave their country's borders?
So if the NSA want to spy on a US citizen they simply enable the UK to spy on that USA citizen and share data afterwards. All very legal and NSA is clear to spy on any US citizen.
So international isolation in the upcoming turmoil times of re-balancing of the global politics may not be the best time to be.
US seems like post-Birsmarck's Germany right now - too powerful, arrogant and incompetent for its own good.
Here you are going wrong because this implies every other country should do the same and therefore harm you. This is nothing but war just without shooting people. Every right you claim for you, you have to grant to everybody. You want to perform industry espionage, then don't call it an act of war if they are spying at you. This is one of the deepest roots of all the mess in this world - not being willing to treat everybody equally.
I actually have a nice Gedankenexperiment. Just imagine for one moment Iran would contact the US government and tell them they fear that the USA may be hostile to them and they are concerned about their atomic weapons. Therefore they would like the USA to denuclearise and grant them access to all their nuclear facilities to oversee what they are doing. Can you imagine the laughs?
I would prefer if we managed to stop this nation vs nation view on things. But, since this is probably impossible, the way forward is to encrypt everything and stop using foreing cloud services.
That's exactly why we have an intelligence arms race developing.
Country A spies on citizens of Country B. Learns all sorts of useful information that could be used for doing some nasty things like black mailing political leaders, manipulating the economy, supporting anti-government groups, etc.
Country B says hey wait a minute. Country A knows more about our our domestic situation than we do because they spy on our citizens and we don't. That could give them a huge strategic advantage. We gotta start spying on our own citizens to stay one step ahead of Country A!
It's the evolution of warfare into the 21st century.
I want to see what the reaction is when we find out that some foreign country is spying on all communications of American citizens and retaining all their data. For sure it is happening. Someone else mentioned GCHQ UK possibly has the same kind of program running with agreements with NSA. Let's just wait for that one to be exposed. Or maybe China. Or Russia. Or N Korea.
Oh I don't know... morals? A simple sense of common decency? I know, it brings a chuckle to talk about such qualities when talking about a government, but let's just pretend for the sake of conversation that the government is for the people and by the people and not a self-propagating hostile life-form.
The first duty of government is surely to protect the interests of the country to which it belongs
Do you not see that the foreigner-spying aspect of this this leak does immeasurable damage to US interests, especially US-based companies? Such simple-minded views are used to defend our drone program. To put it crudely, we can't go around the world fucking everyone else in every which way and continue to pretend to be the good guys. The concept of this country being a good citizen of the world hasn't even occurred to most Americans.
your co-citizens will be rightly outraged
You beg the question. They may be outraged, but I don't think they'll be rightly outraged. People tend to have very myopic perspectives in the face of disaster. I don't think that's the bar by which we should set our policy.
As a non-US citizen (UK) the NSA supposedly has all my communications stored. I have no say in that and it seems that people are treating that as a non-issue. 'Ahh foreigners won't mind.' But we do
I'm curious, do you think it would be unethical for British Intelligence to spy on someone in, say, Pakistan?
This sudden outrage is odd, honestly what did people think the NSA did with their tens of billions of dollars per year budget?
My comment is more about how so many people seem to be blindsided that this is what the NSA does. It should have been assumed, even expected.