You are forgetting this is being backed by Politicians and the organizations lawyers. To them it is not illegal what they are doing, the laws dont apply to people who are not in the US and that is why they think is ok to spy on foreign nationals abroad.

>We have a right to be upset if China sells us routers which are bugged. We all agree that those are bad things. Yet we do them to others.

This is the hypocrisy of it all. When you do it its bad but when we do its not. Do as we say not as we do. This is the part I dont agree with (and spying on innocent people).

Political manoeuvring between states isn't a game that you can just choose not to play. Gathering intelligence about what the other players are doing, or intend to do, is an absolutely necessary part of the whole gambit. If the US and others didn't do this, they would be playing blind against better informed opponents.

Each country is a team, competing on the political, military and economic fronts. Spying on your own citizens is wrong because they are supposed to be teammates, not adversaries. When this is done to consolidate power among those who are meant to be working in our best interests, we see that as an abuse of power and a subversion of the mechanisms of democracy in our own state. It's bad for the long term health of the political system of any democratic nation.

Spying on your opponents is a completely different issue, as typically you are working in your team's best interests. Like many issues in life, it's complicated, and taking a hard line moral stance on the issue just isn't practical.

I upvoted you because I think you raise an important question, but I'm also trying to point out that spying at home and abroad can't necessarily be evaluated on the same criteria. There are practical reasons to stop a government from spying on its own citizens, it isn't necessarily a moral argument.

Treating every country as your opponent does not help either. Each country trying to outdo others will only lead to increased hostility and distrust in the world. At least the countries in comfortable/powerful position can avoid operating in survival mode and resist spying on non-hostile nations.

Which would mean something, if asymmetric warfare weren't as potentially devastatingly effective as it is or it didn't have huge ramifications for our ability to protect and enforce treaty agreements with friendly neighbors.

How do you propose to track the development, sale or transport of nuclear arms without an intelligence service undertaking covert surveillance?

How do you plan to stay informed of the actions and unit deployments of military forces by antagonists, or aware of the political allegiances and likely responses of your notional allies?

I mean right now in various former Soviet bloc countries, there's a lot of back-door manoeuvering going on which is fomenting political tension (you may have seen the unrest in Bulgaria recently, or you know, when the Russians invaded Georgia) in large part due to old cold war east/west divides - even if the prize these days is development and construction contracts (and probably a lot of bribes) and not determining which land gets turned into radioactive waste.

The idea that there are clear good guys who are definitely on "our" side is farcical - country's aren't individuals. They're large aggregate groups, pulled in a million different directions, and their governments consist of a shifting mirage of faces which may or may not be trustworthy and which a good deal of time is spent keeping up with to make sure 'we' know what we're dealing with at all levels.

Since when are countries teams? There's as much conflict in a country, as between them.

Meant to up vote you but blurry, just-put-contacts-in eyes clicked the down arrow.