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Re:New WikiLeaks Documents Reveal NSA Spied on French Companies by kasey_junk on Monday June 29, 2015 @04:32PM (#9800803)
> When France does it, it's bad. When the USA does it it is bad too.

I think that this is a legitimate moral position to take, but I think you will find that it is less widely held than other legitimate moral positions you might take (for instance spy agencies spying on their own citizens is more broadly recognized as bad).

Further, it seems to be a moral position that doesn't have much basis in practice. Industrial activities are fundamentally linked with traditional espionage targets such as diplomacy, military technology and military operations. To deny an intelligence agency access to those things seems no different than to deny them the ability to operate at all. Which is another legitimate moral stand to take, but one that has even less broad acceptance.

Re:New WikiLeaks Documents Reveal NSA Spied on French Companies by emmab on Monday June 29, 2015 @05:28PM (#9801244)
> for instance spy agencies spying on their own citizens is more broadly recognized as bad)

An instance of the more general value of "personal privacy" which has nothing to do with such abstract constructions as "nations".

If we value personal privacy, then spying always involves intrinsic harm, and the question is whether we should tolerate that harm for some greater good.

... and whether we want to go down the path of seeing ourselves as the sort of people who will tolerate harm to innocents for the greater good.

Re:New WikiLeaks Documents Reveal NSA Spied on French Companies by jacquesm on Monday June 29, 2015 @04:36PM (#9800839)
When morals and gains are aligned being moral is easy.
Re:New WikiLeaks Documents Reveal NSA Spied on French Companies by kasey_junk on Monday June 29, 2015 @06:54PM (#9801705)
That implies that the people arguing for effective intelligence agencies are doing so because of expedience. I for one believe that effective intelligence agencies are a net good for the world as they decrease the instance of and shorten the length of shooting wars.
Re:New WikiLeaks Documents Reveal NSA Spied on French Companies by jacquesm on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @06:00AM (#9810904)
> as they decrease the instance of and shorten the length of shooting wars.

That's definitely not a proven item, in fact you could easily argue the opposite. Faulty intelligence has led to quite a few wars, and is worse than no intelligence at all, also, what intelligence there is tends to be cherry picked to support foregone conclusions.