To be honest it really should be part of the NSA remit to spy on as many world leaders as possible (friend or foe) I expect GCHQ & whatever the French equivalent is to be doing exactly the same.
This canard seems to be dragged out as a response to any abridgement of civil liberties (of course the FBI should have a agent in every environmental group! Of course Uber should be paying Lyft executives secretly for access to their trade secrets! Of course the NSA should listen in on every phone call! To do otherwise would be stupid and incompetent, and I don't want a stupid incompetent government/company/father.)
What happens when you spy on everyone is that when you get caught, your diplomacy breaks down all over the world and you can't get anything done without direct threats. Also, no one lets anyone connected with you get close to anything important, because you are untrustworthy i.e. when you say you're going to send weapons inspectors, Iraq says: don't send any Americans, they only send spies. A lot of people who studied at American universities and return home get imprisoned and/or executed.
Intelligence gathering is something you do because you want to gain leverage, not lose it. Instead, in the US, it's become another teat for huge incompetent contractors to suck the taxpayer dry.
This seems an odd article to express this sentiment on. Whether or not the canard is used in other contexts to whitewash civil liberties abuses, in this specific example, it is being used correctly.
If your spy agencies are not going to gather intelligence on foreign world leaders, who precisely should they be gathering intelligence on? If your answer is that there is no acceptable use of intelligence gathering facilities, that is fine, but that is a much more extreme belief than the one that says it is ok for the NSA to spy on the leaders of France.
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This canard seems to be dragged out as a response to any abridgement of civil liberties (of course the FBI should have a agent in every environmental group! Of course Uber should be paying Lyft executives secretly for access to their trade secrets! Of course the NSA should listen in on every phone call! To do otherwise would be stupid and incompetent, and I don't want a stupid incompetent government/company/father.)
What happens when you spy on everyone is that when you get caught, your diplomacy breaks down all over the world and you can't get anything done without direct threats. Also, no one lets anyone connected with you get close to anything important, because you are untrustworthy i.e. when you say you're going to send weapons inspectors, Iraq says: don't send any Americans, they only send spies. A lot of people who studied at American universities and return home get imprisoned and/or executed.
Intelligence gathering is something you do because you want to gain leverage, not lose it. Instead, in the US, it's become another teat for huge incompetent contractors to suck the taxpayer dry.
This seems an odd article to express this sentiment on. Whether or not the canard is used in other contexts to whitewash civil liberties abuses, in this specific example, it is being used correctly.
If your spy agencies are not going to gather intelligence on foreign world leaders, who precisely should they be gathering intelligence on? If your answer is that there is no acceptable use of intelligence gathering facilities, that is fine, but that is a much more extreme belief than the one that says it is ok for the NSA to spy on the leaders of France.