Doesn't mean it's right. In fact it's fucking wrong. The CIA should be abolished. And this saber-rattling against a country that poses no risk to us is disgusting and wrong. The US is the most dangerous country in the world and must be stopped.
I would argue that mutual spying in general is a good thing and that it generally has the potential, properly managed, to prevent war. The problem has to do with leadership and less to do with spying itself.
During the cold war, both the US and USSR had extensive satellites deployed that would provide an early warning for the launch of ICBM's. As Lt. Robert Bowman pointed out in "Star Wars: A Defense Expert's Case Against the Strategic Defense Initiative," this had a stabilizing effect because both sides could be certain they were not being attacked and therefore would not be inclined to mistakenly counter-attack. Spying can have a similar effect in that it can provide additional reason to believe that another party is not in the process of preparing an attack.
The larger problem though is that geopolitics is real. We didn't invade Iraq for the reasons we were told. We did it for geopolitical and domestic political reasons, and every piece of data would be tortured enough that it would say what the government wanted it to say, even if no reasonable person could put all the data together and make it say what Bush wanted it to say. In this area then spying is beside the point.
We shouldn't forget that the CIA exists to offer a counterbalance to military intelligence which is more likely to rattle sabres than a civilian agency.
I mostly agree with your comment; the CIA has been relatively benign compared to other agencies and the military at large. My own take on the moral implications of spying is that if you already have a Palantir, you might as well use it since more information is advantageous in the zero-sum games countries play. But I wouldn't go out of my way to find/build one--I think the resources could be spent to greater effect elsewhere in such a case.
Yes. In fact his big criticism of antisatellite missiles was that if the USSR knows we have the capability to take down their satellites, this adds additional failure conditions that could be mistaken for a prelude to an attack. So for example a satellite runs into a piece of space junk and is destroyed. Now you have to decide whether that was the result of hostile anti-satellite warfare (and a prelude to a nuclear first strike) or whether it is just an ordinary malfunction.
That spying on people is wrong and you don't believe it should be done is a laudable moral position and quite reasonable to expect out of the vast majority of the world's population.
That doesn't change the fact that it'd be an absolutely disastrous approach to running a county.
U.S. invading Iranian airspace is not as benign as you are pretending especially given it is not an isolated incident. It is one thing to have the neighborhood peeping tom looking in your window, another thing to have a serial killer rapist snooping inside your house. The U.S. government has aggressively worked to overthrow the Iranian government by setting U.S. public opinion against the Iranian government for possible military action. The U.S. has also installed sanctions, the 2007 congress funding of covert operations inside Iran, Iranian scientist assassinations, and the recent dubious Saudi assassination plot.
why do we need to spy on other governments unless we're going to war with somebody? The US has overthrown 50 governments since wwii. How about we srop doing that?
