Comment by alt227
14 days ago
It baffles me how you seem to think intelligence agencies have some sort of morals or sense of duty to their citizens. These organisations are set up with the sole purpose of spying on all people. They have done it for decades and have done it in some fantasticly dispicable ways. So no, asking a corporation for data on their customers is probably is probably a relatively weak action for them to pull on the grand scheme of things.
Sure, but something like this isn't limited to just the spy agencies. They don't have the authority to do something like this on their own. Therefore there must be some buy-in from people outside the intelligence communities such as MPs, members of Congress (in US), etc. Those are the groups I think GP's comment deserves an answer to.
I totally get the spy agencies' "moral flexibility" requirements, as I've heard it put.
From what I understand, the spy agencies have ways of obtaining your private information that don't necessarily involve blanket requirements to access all users' data (e.g. creative ways of injecting malware into specific people's devices). But those approaches don't scale, of course. And they shouldn't need to.
Intelligence agencies may have their own definitions of morality, but they do not exist outside of the law, which is supposed to be the output of a democratic process.