EDIT, Also NSA is a intelligence agency: spying on foreigners seems to me like it'd be their objective, regardless of the revelations... Lets not act surprised about this now. Other foreign intelligence agencies do their share of spying on foreigners too (again, their objective). Unless you're stressing 'widespread'.
And the objective of the KKK was to spread fear on certain parts of the population. That doesn't make it OK. Objectives, even obvious ones, can be shitty too.
Also, spying on elect foreigners, doing targeted work to get intelligence data on terrorism etc is one thing. Spying on almost everybody on the world, and especially targetting politicians, allies, officials involved in trade deals, etc, is not what it should be doing. The German chancellor is not bloody Osama, and helping some major corporation get a stronghold in some country is not about "national security".
While I agree with your overall message, and even the part I quote, if you think "holistically" then it is in the US interest to dominate trade negotiations through intelligence. For example, it's better for US national security if Brazil had bought a US fighter. It strengthens the financial health of Boeing, makes it easier for the US to keep up a certain level of capability (paid for by foreignors, win-win!), has money coming in to the US for decades as a result of the maintenance contracts, and there's a non-zero chance that the software for flying those planes have backdoors and loggers.
I'm not saying it's right, but the security forces and corporations are very much motivated for this to happen, with ready made excuses of national security to justify it.
I don't know why we should find this more acceptable, whether NSA or foreign agencies. If it is supposed to be acceptable, than give every single person even greater power of surveillance of powerful government/corporate entities and their agents, given their power, they are more likely to do serious harm when unaccountable.
That's also a flawed argument. So what? Awareness has to built up for complaining to happen first -- and sometimes it doesn't even build up that much. Sometimes the complaining only happens after much damage has been done.
The existence or not of complaints against something doesn't justify it. People didn't complaint about slavery much back in the day either.
This comment is very trite. Everyone expects them to be performing espionage, but dragnet surveillance of civilians on this scale, domestic or foreign, is completely unprecedented and unacceptable.