From a realpolitic point of view, the problem is the scale of the spying. In the old days of humint, you had to train a suitable agent and insert them into the appropriate organization, then set up more agents to pick up their intelligence and pass it back up the chain to the analysts. The scale was restrained by the difficulty and expense of training agents and analysts, and countries had rough parity with each other. The USA, forex, is a big influential country, which meant that it spied on a lot of countries — yes, even its allies — but a lot of countries spied on it, using precisely the same methods.
Up until a decade or so ago, even sigint required human management at a fairly low level. With the increased capabilities afforded by both Moore’s Law continuing unabated and the inflated budgets conned out of Congress for the War on Terr, there’s now little restraint on the ability of the NSA to automatically gather data and mine it for correlations, which gives the USA enormous advantage over the rest of us. It’s no longer about a low-level bureaucrat or two passing on memos and gossip back to Washington or Berlin; it’s now a few bureaucrats passing a few files to Berlin and the NSA recording seven million phone calls a month for Washington. And ditto for every other so-called ally of the USA.
Look, no offence, America, we’re friends and all, but that doesn’t mean I want you privy to nearly everything significant that goes on in my government, or between my government and Merkal’s.
