Interesting, are you using the word "warrantless" as a synonym for "baseless" or as meaning "without a warrant granted by a court of law"? If it's the first, I agree wholeheartedly - it's both unethical and just plain stupid for my government to spend time, money, political capital, and the ability to look itself in the mirror without cringing on being able to access the pornography of private citizens of ally countries. If it's the latter, I disagree - I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries.
You should be pissed, and it pisses me off that my government is pissing you off, but that doesn't mean I think it needs to get warrants to spy on other countries.
I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries.
And where then does it stop? Should countries also not be required or require themselves to provide due process to citizens of other countries when they visit? How about not recognizing property rights, and confiscating their belongings? Why not go the whole way and just shoot the ones you don't like?
The reason that international human rights treaties exist is that adopting isolationist policy in the area of human rights is a move that creates no winners. We just seem to have forgotten that in the context of the Internet, because the violations take place at home while the immediate victims are abroad. But the indirect consequences will probably come back to haunt those who don't respect citizens of other nations all too quickly, whether it is in loss of tourist trade, or loss of control of technologies like the Internet because a single nation is no longer trusted to administer that technology impartially, or more direct consequences to the bottom line if for example technology companies with cloud-based offerings are no longer trusted by foreign customers.
The US seems to be particularly at risk today, because it has been a natural leader in some of these fields and has been trusted to act responsibly in that capacity. That trust is rapidly being eroded, and the US has more to lose as a consequence than most. Still, the general us-and-them attitude in today's international politics is a plague on all our houses.
"And where then does it stop? Should countries also not be required or require themselves to provide due process to citizens of other countries when they visit? How about not recognizing property rights, and confiscating their belongings? Why not go the whole way and just shoot the ones you don't like?"
Well, something like that is already considered quite legal, right? A Uruguayan citizen who buys some pot from his local government store and then boards a plane to Singapore isn't going to have a nice time in Singapore, even though by Uruguayan standards he's done nothing wrong: his property rights in that pot will not be recognized, at the very least, and probably he will be severely punished for something not considered a crime in his home country.
When country A is doing violence to the citizens of countries B and C inside country A, the usual response is merely that B and C recommend that their citizens not go to A. If the citizens were considered important, sometimes there's a protest of some sort.
> I don't think countries (the U.S., Norway, whoever) should be required or require themselves to get warrants to surveil citizens of other countries.
I think there is a difference between committing illegal actions when they are inevitable (I can understand that, eg, the US would want to conduct targeted surveillance on known AQ members abroad). It's another thing to make it into an all-encompassing, industrial activity. And clearly, the distinction between "national" and "foreign" is rather... blurry. The US, the Europeans, the Australians, I assume Japan, Korean, Taiwan... look like they have a good working relationship, in which everybody can spy on everybody else, as long as you can pretend it's about security.
it should be like in war, bombing civilians is a war crime, spying on even foreign civilians should never be legally accepted. ever. otherwise we re on the fast track toward another catastrophe for the human race and one of its unique features, freedom.
You should be pissed, and it pisses me off that my government is pissing you off, but that doesn't mean I think it needs to get warrants to spy on other countries.