Comment by pnathan
12 years ago
The purpose of intelligence agencies is to spy on non-citizens, both in peacetime and in wartime. One might argue that traditionally they focused on public figures in the foreign states and that spying on average foreigners is new; I don't know if that's true, but seems plausible.
It would generally be a dereliction of duty for the NSA/CIA to not spy on non-Americans. The same holds true, modulo agency name and country, for any other country.
Now, if you want to make the argument that national borders should dissolve and that spying on foreigners should become history - or something like that - that's up to you. But spy agency gonna spy.
Come on, say it to my face! You don't believe non-US people have a right to privacy. That's me! Your agencies can do whatever they want to me, but not to you.
You're on the public Internet, you're not "within national borders", and everybody can hear what you just said. Say it to my face. Tell me how you feel that it's just fine to violate my privacy, that it's apparently perfectly fine to pry into my life, hack my phone networks, to gather any possible information there is to know about me and all those around me, just because I'm not a US citizen, and you are. You are better and are entitled to these protections, I don't.
> The same holds true, modulo agency name and country, for any other country.
Not every country believes that their citizens are somehow exceptional and non-citizens can be treated however they please.
I think that, in today's world, everyone, particularly public people of interest to other countries, should reasonably expect to have foreign countries gather information about them, up to and including spying.
For example, if I was doing important security research, I would fully expect to have the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, etc, looking into my work.
I don't believe the US is exceptional. I expect other countries to have interests in US citizens and to carry out their interests to advance their national interest.
This expectation is entirely separate from my opinion of the morality of said act.
Every state privileges its own citizens. There are good reasons for doing so that have nothing to do with bigotry or exceptionalism.
Some of us don't consider human rights a "privilege".
4 replies →
> The purpose of intelligence agencies is to spy on non-citizens, both in peacetime and in wartime.
No, the purpose of intelligence agencies is to gather and analyze information that might be of use to the nations leaders. Spying -- whether on citizens or foreigners, and whether on people located within the country or abroad -- is often a mechanism used to gather information (though collection from public sources is also a common mechanism.)
And there's nothing really special about the foreign vs. domestic (whether by location or citizenship) axis for "intelligence agencies", generally -- while sometimes the agencies that do domestic and foreign intelligence gathering are separate, that's not always the case, and certainly not a defining feature of "intelligence agencies."
You are correct - I overspecialized in my comment (and focused too much on the US, which attempts to separate domestic and foreign intelligence)- but I would argue that espionage is a signature of intelligence agencies and their efforts; expecting such agencies not to make significant espionage efforts doesn't really cohere with reality.
That is what I would prefer. I can not think of a good reason why we (Germany) should spy at our friends like France, the UK or the USA. Agencies should gather information about (potentially) dangerous citizens in their country and share this information with other countries. I have also no problem with collecting information in war zones and I include countries hosting terrorists where you can not rely on there agencies to provide good information here.
So it turns out, you can apply the naturalistic fallacy to things that are entirely of human construction...