2013 Snowden leaks

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Myth #1: every nation spies on other nations, therefore spying is acceptable[edit | edit source]

This is a false equivalence. Nobody spies on the same scale as the United States:

Mr. Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of N.S.A. eavesdropping. Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the European Union, Mexico, France, Germany and Spain. Chagrined American officials joke that soon there will be complaints from foreign leaders feeling slighted because the agency had not targeted them.


James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of spying. But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of eavesdropping by the N.S.A., with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets it apart. “There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/no-morsel-too-minuscule-for-all-consuming-nsa.html

Few in Washington are challenging the administration's claim that "all nations" engage in similar forms of espionage.


However diplomatic sources have told the Guardian that the White House's declarations that its practices do not differ from those employed by "all nations" are deeply misleading.

The sources said that while the US, Russia, China, Britain and France are well-known to engage in aggressive cyber espionage, including against allies, many other countries do not have anywhere near the same surveillance infrastructure – and concentrate their more limited resources on counter-terrorism and serious crime.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/27/barack-obama-nsa-angela-merkel-germany

And, apart from the differences in scale, scope and intrusiveness, two wrongs do not make a right. The fact that France may spy on the United States (while obviously not on a smaller scale) does not make right the fact that the United States spies on France. It certainly wouldn't matter for an outside observer, like the U.N.; If the U.N. were to look at the behaviour of both nations and were asked for an advisory opinion, it would condemn, not tolerate, both spy programs.