The NSA's foreign activity is very much a part of the problem. American interests are damaged for the forseeable future because of revelations about their corruption of the internet, of hardware shipped overseas, of cable traffic, and on and on.
That kind of thinking is the product of availability bias: you think about NSA's foreign activity, because it's been leaked en masse. But it would be incredibly naive to think that major European countries --- not just the UK, but particularly France and Germany --- haven't been doing the exact same things for years. When we get to talking about "foreign intelligence", we are talking about pure SIGINT, of the sort that has been practiced since before the computer era --- in fact, the sort of SIGINT that presaged and motivated the computer era to begin with.
Really? Can anyone argue that what the NSA is doing resembles anything that ever went before? Using (subverting) the entire power of the internet and its major commercial inventors/backbone to capture petabytes of personal data on everyone everywhere?
Since our European friends have lesser resources, I cannot imagine they have done/would even conceive of doing anything so cold-blooded as our NSA has done. Which internet authorities are centered in Germany? Any?
In fact, I imagine a new Internet rule will have to be created, where invoking the NSA as hyperbole ends a thread in much the same way as NAZIs or Hitler do now.
One could argue that if one wanted to move the goalposts back to pretend that one was arguing with a point that nobody disagrees with. My understanding is that you were talking about foreign signals intelligence, and that was what I was commenting on.
