Yes, spying is practiced worldwide by just about everyone. I never claimed otherwise. But that doesn't mean it's tolerated. Every country wants to spy and not be spied on.
You don't actually think the U.S. is the only country spying on its citizens or the world right?
The only reason it's even a huge deal is because of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In countries without a similar constitutional guarantee your spy agencies probably aren't even breaking the law. They're probably watching everything you do with total impunity.
Everyone's spying - US, China, Europe, Middle East, East.
Some are lesser known to detain and try in secret courts (USA), others are known to do that rampantly (china)
everyone knows that they're doing it and agrees it should be done as a matter of policy.
Not everyone, and especially not when you're talking about "friendly" governments (aka, our allies). And even more so when the spying is being done for industrial espionage / economic advantage purposes, and not national defense.
It's a concern anywhere and everywhere. The US is far from the only country or organization that spies on others. Other nations do it, criminal organizations do it, etc.
And spying isn’t even the most likely source of information leaks. More likely is that you have an insider threat or someone who unintentionally leaks information.
The US has never denied that it spies on other countries’ citizens and state apparatus. Every nation does.
The only controversy has been about whether the US intelligence community spies on US citizens without warrants, which used to be considered out of bounds, but is now awash in murkiness.
By this argument, basically every other country in the world should spy as much as possible on the US, since our surveillance is so ubiquitous. Do you agree?
We are led to believe that adversaries spy on each other. The vast majority of spying in the world are allies against allies. The biggest spy rings in the US by far are israeli and british/canadian not the russians or the chinese. It seems counterintuitive, but if you think about it from a practical and geopolitical standpoint, it's fairly obvious. The country that spies the most on the EU members isn't russia, it's the US.
You're being intentionally obtuse. The only country which actively spies on pretty much everyone in the world is the US, via the NSA. And the NSA is the very definition of "state sponsored". In effect the US is running the largest state sponsored hacking programme that the world has ever seen. So who did the US prosecute for that?
> America prosecutes American hackers who hack foreign nationals
To this day the only person connected to US state sponsored hacking who was prosecuted is Edward Snowden, the guy who blew the whistle on said program. That says everything about the situation. The US is hacking everything that can be hacked, then floods western media with reports of Russian, Iranian, Chinese, and North Korean state sponsored hacks.
> They would if they could.
"Solid" defense there. The kind of argument the Mafia would use as a defense, which just happens to be really unprovable.
We know the US isn't the only country engaged in widespread spying. I'd be surprised if Brazil isn't doing it. We're all probably better off assuming that any country that can spy, is doing it. Of course, people can call me paranoid for saying this, but I suspect the tide is turning in favour of such paranoia.
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