>but is it correct to spy on your own people and partner countries?
It's rude, but I think to a degree it is acceptable, and probably expected. Friendly countries spy on each other all the time. For one thing, friendly countries might not remain friendly forever.
You know what has millions of people and is entirely unlike an individual human being? A country.
The convenient narratives spun to explain international politics seem entirely lost on people and are being treated as literal relations of how countries behave rather then shorthand.
"China" doesn't act like a person. It doesn't have emotions, moods or opinions like a person does. When we talk about "China thinks this" or "China feels that" we are not describing the moods of a human being, we're not even describing necessarily the aggregate mood of it's government except in so far as we're using a shorthand because we want to talk about trends in policy making or the types of people being appointed as advisers/policy-makers on whichever issue we are actually talking about specifically.
Countries and the people who make them up also form alliances, hate betrayal, and hold grudges. If your country thinks it is acceptable to betray allies, you will soon have no allies. If you say one thing and do another and the gap is wide enough, eventually no other country will believe a word you say, even when you tell the truth.
Alliances between countries are not formed in a rational way just on a specific issue normally, but based on previous actions and previous issues, and old loyalties. To betray those loyalties just means no-one will feel any loyalty to you - that may work in the short-term if you are big enough but long-term it's a terrible strategy.
So in that sense countries are like people, though I agree in many senses they are not.
Alliances are not formed on a specific issue, which is also why they're not broken on intangible issues. This is theatre by Merkel because it plays well with her public. I don't imagine US diplomats are losing any sleep over this.
That's true, but the easiest way not to get caught is to not do it at all.
Presumably spying on friends may be needed someday, but it brings the kind of diplomatic flamefest that should keep such spying restricted to Very Important Things and not just "we'll tap them because their numbers fell in our lap".
To a degree, maybe. But the uproar over these NSA revelations, which has already led to proposed changes to EU law that will have substantial impacts on US businesses, demonstrates that they've gone well past what is considered acceptable.
You know what? Every nation state has my blessing to do a blanket collection of digital communications the moment they don't call me a terrorist for encrypting my email, call the whole thing unwarranted or don't hand over my password.
It's rude, but I think to a degree it is acceptable, and probably expected. Friendly countries spy on each other all the time. For one thing, friendly countries might not remain friendly forever.