Yes. We have Constitutional rights that protect us from such surveillance. Foreigners have no such protections from the U.S. government. This has essentially "lifted the veil" and made it abundantly clear that our government will no longer respect the rights of it's citizen's, even in a formal official capacity.
This is no surprise to me, as such abuses tend to go hand in hand, but it definitely takes things to a new level.
> We have Constitutional rights that protect us from such surveillance. Foreigners have no such protections from the U.S. government.
This is an example of a lie that has repeated often enough to have become the truth. The Bill of Rights limits what the government can and can't do, period.
Yes! To a first approximation, my government doesn't have the power to put you in jail for, say, hacking into a local server in your hometown. (Yours doesn't have that power over me, either.)
So (again to a first approximation) the files that my government collects on you are only available to be used in cases with some sort of international significance. (And the same with the files that your government collects on me.) I see a vast difference between that situation and the situation where a local cop can casually dig through these vast databases to find out if I've ever been associated with anything at all potentially illegal.
There might be some deceased cell phone owners in Yemen that might disagree.
But in general, yes, spying on foreign nations have always been illegal, and always considered to be inevitable.
On the other hand, with the information sharing across borders (NSA spies on UK citizens, MI6 spies on US citizens) -- this line has already been blurred (Or for a less "redundant" example than the UK, Swedish and Norwegian intelligence services have had a rather incestuous, illegal secret relationship for a long time).
All that aside: a state where the electorate fear the elected, rather than the other way around (or; where the elected takes steps to act on their fear of the electorate) is no longer a democracy.
I'm sorry, but in a time where the US is killing people on the other side of the world using unmanned bomber drones based on just this international spying, I have a hard time believing that any of this should be "fair game".
We can and should surveil the heck out of the rest of the world -- to be used for intelligence purposes only.
The problem is when this intelligence information gets used for domestic criminal cases -- no matter which country is involved. So if the Saudis want to know every detail about my life, who cares? They never release the data, I'm not a threat to them, and life goes on. But if the Saudis give that information to U.S. authorities, and then the U.S. authorities arrest me for a laundry list of crimes? I've effectively had my privacy and private papers violated without any kind of due process.
You can't start building "escape hatches" into the agreement you have with your government. It breaks the entire system. Used to be that grownups realized this, but lately the well-meaning idiots seem to be in charge.
This is no surprise to me, as such abuses tend to go hand in hand, but it definitely takes things to a new level.