I understand fully! Any competent intelligence agency is of course capable of serving more than one purpose at once. I do not in any way, shape, form, or manner believe that an intelligence apparatus is inherently capable of pursuing only a single task. Please accept my apologies for this egregious failure on my part to communicate clearly.
You're absolutely, completely right. All of this is completely normal. With that in mind, perhaps potshots at professionals doing things considered normal could be better justified?
>Countries look out for their own self interests beyond anything else.
And of course, governments only help local companies like this, if they in turn help their government.
This was a decision made back during the Clinton years.
You're welcome to share your evidence to the contrary.
NSA spying on EADS (Airbus)[1].
NSA spying on Eurocopter[2].
NSA spying on Siemens[3].
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-petr...
[1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/bnd-und-nsa-die-chronolo...
[2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/geheimdienst-affaere-nsa...
[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/edward-snowden-says-nsa-engage...
In general, there are two claims being made here. Claim one is that the US has spied on a series of corporations. Claim two is that this has been done for the purposes of economic gain. The truth of claim one makes it possible for claim two to be true, but a cautious reader might note that what is possible and what is certainly true can at times be different.
Not to wax cynical, but Ms. Rousseff's claim that there's no possible other reason to spy on Petrobras is not credible. Not because she was clearly lying (I cannot begin to evaluate that), but because there's no reasonable world in which she understood all possible aspects of the decision-making process that produced that spying.
Given the type of corruption that Petrobras has been involved in, spies could have been pursuing a financial trail. This is not a certainty, of course, but it is sufficiently plausible that it's impossible to be certain that the NSA could only have been active there for purposes of industrial espionage.
>"The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber," the agency said in an emailed response to a Washington Post story on the subject last month.
>In a statement issued on Sunday night after the latest revelations aired in Brazil, the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said: "It is not a secret that the intelligence community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing.
>"We collect this information for many important reasons: for one, it could provide the United States and our allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy. It also could provide insight into other countries' economic policy or behavior which could affect global markets."
>But he again denied this amounted to industrial espionage. "What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line."
Maybe they're right. But how can we possibly know they're actually telling the truth? Especially when the intelligence agencies' job is essentially to lie?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150629/16134031494/nsa-d...
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140524/07014427355/forme...
> But I guess this is boring by comparison to imagining that a historical financial center only functions through ill-gotten commercial intelligence.
Nobody said anything about "only functioning because..."
The entire basis for your position seems to be that an intelligence apparatus can only do exactly one thing at a time. It can either be for diplomatic reasons OR commercial spying, not both...
In reality governments extract as much value out of the intelligence networks and collected information as they can. If the collected information is going to help a domestic business interest against a foreign one (e.g. contract negotiations, mergers, sales, etc) you can bet your butt that tips will be supplied.
You really think that the US government doesn't routinely "tip" off Boeing and several European countries Airbus?
Countries look out for their own self interests beyond anything else. Expecting that they'll only do so some of the time rather than all of the time, seems like an opinion based more around how you'd wish a country to act morally, rather than the reality on the ground.