That's quite a claim. Right now the NSA holds privileged information for millions of Americans. What happens if one of those people becomes some populist political entity. It would be trivial for the NSA to leak dirt of any kind (sexual fetishes, hangups, private emails to wife, other private things that when taken to the public would look bad, trash talking others, etc) to help discredit this person. Imagine that this person ran on a platform for cutting down the NSA or reforming the intelligence agencies. How "protected" do you think this "metadata" would be?

The Chinese wouldn't do that to me. They don't have a dog in this fight.

That's quite a claim.

US Government agencies using "dirt" to smear and/or blackmail populist political figures is a historic fact.

Exactly. See Martin Luther King Jr [0] as an example. Private information obtained through surveillance was leaked by government agencies in an attempt to discredit him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#FBI_an...

I know a lot of Snowden's and Assanges' sex life and many, many personal details. I've never actively seeked out that information.

Also, the US has proven experience in smearing political characters. Heck, even John fucking Lennon had an FBI file full of personal information.

It would have also been "quite a claim" awhile back about the NSA collecting anything and everything about citizens. I don't get your comment.

They don't have a dog in that fight because you specifically chose the fight to make that true. If the same person ran on a different platform that argued for, say, boycotting or tariffing Chinese green energy products in order to build up local industries, the Chinese would care but the NSA would not.

Ironically, at the time it would appear that the NSA was probably prohibited from spying on at least US-based Boing personnel. In fact, even today, they claim they'd be prohibited from looking at it(though not collecting it or analyzing meta data which is the whole problem) at least as far as the people involved are US Persons.

I think I see what you are getting at, but surely a trade with a foreign nation like Saudi Arabia - because the Saudi's are foreign, the NSA would have always had the remit to spy on the transaction?

I used to think much the same. These days however the unchecked secret security apparatus of the United States is a sword over the necks of it's citizens' freedom.

I'd argue that the NSA is actively destroying more american business right now by discouraging large international companies from doing business with US based technology and web companies.