Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the explicit purpose of intelligence agencies to gather intelligence about foreign countries (allied or otherwise) to further the national interest? I don't really see how this is a creep of power (as opposed to, say, counter-terror activities, where an agency that previously only surveilled foreign powers may now monitor its own citizens).

French intelligence services are using this to ask more money and less restraint right now, that's how funding and manpower comparisons made it in the article. US intel services probably did the same a couple of years back when Obama moaned about chinese spying.

Overall, a significant share of these powers have been and will be used in ways and for goals that are detrimental to the well-being of democratic political systems.

It's a bit like saying that the explicit purpose of hitmen is to murder people for money.

Doesn't make it right.

I'm not defending any state spying, but geopolitics is different from individual interactions. Not anticipating the moves of the other nations means risking millions of lives of people from you country. Wars, nuclear wars, economic depression, etc. It's sad but we haven't yet solved many problems to fully become a democratic Earth (e.g. distribution of knowledge, election of politics. which basically are the same problems we see in distributed computing systems).

There is no such thing "national interest." There is only the interest of individuals. Sometimes they align with the majority of people, sometimes they do not.

Why do you assume that this was done not at the direct orders of the executive branch? The director of the NSA is a general, the NSA is the only intelligence agency that is almost under the direct control of POTUS.

I don't see how this changes my point. A single man giving orders does not define a democracy. Democracy requires accountability and public oversight.

What's the difference between an unelected man in charge and an elected one, if you can't know what they do, anyway ?

The difference is that we elected the guy doing the overseeing, Barack Obama. In fact we elected him twice. That's democracy. If we don't like what NSA is doing under the President's command, we'll elect a different president, or our elected men and women in Congress can hold the President accountable.

> If we don't like what NSA is doing under the President's command, [...]

For that, you would need oversight, which intel shops typically don't provide. For instance, there's a history of scandals being revealed long after they were done in western democracies.

There's also the matter of being able to effectively implement a political program reducing the powers of intel agencies. To my knowledge this has never happened outside of political upheavals. Even then, if you look at the Church committee report and the Snowden affair, advances seem to be quickly erased.

Last time I've checked there is an intelligence oversight committee.

You can say that the process can be improved but it's not like there is a shadowy organization that does w/e it wants without any oversight.

Remember when the CIA managed to finally get even Feinstein to make statements critical about surveillance, after it was clear that the CIA was caught spying on the Senate intelligence committee while they prepared the report on torture?

Snowden is another good example of how poor the oversight is - whether because they didn't think any of what has been revealed was wrong, or because they didn't know. I'm not sure which is worse.

> but it's not like there is a shadowy organization that does w/e it wants without any oversight.

And how would you know when documents are classified and everything can be overrun by secret courts and intelligence puppeteers?