[MichaelBurge]

Yes, we should spy on foreign countries and have an agency to protect ourselves from them. It's not abstract - China attacks us every day. I don't want Chinese hackers breaking into American companies and stealing their secrets, and trust the NSA to do their job on this.

They should work with the FBI to inform companies of foreigners causing trouble with their systems. And they should develop secure protocols and encryption for the benefit of the government and public. Any NSA-collected data should be inadmissible in any court, and they should not be backdooring encryption. They also shouldn't collect any data from purely US-internal networking. On that point, it would be great if packets with start and end points within the US were virtually guaranteed to stay within the US when being routed, but I don't know enough about internet infrastructure to tell whether that's possible.

When Trump gets elected, I bet he'll take a more direct route here and just sanction them or disconnect their internet or something, which should put a stop to it. Then we won't need to rely on the NSA for defense as much.

[Nullabillity]

As opposed to American hackers hacking American companies? Nationality has nothing to do with it, other than with jingoistic profiteers and/or morons who want a vaguely defined distant target to blame.

[nickpsecurity]

Law enforcement deals with that. NSA is part of the military-intelligence complex. We keep the two separate.

[MichaelBurge]

That's outside the scope of NSA's mandate. The NSA should not be using their resources to target American hackers or companies.

We should deal with such hackers too, using agencies like the FBI. I guess the NSA could provide some technical advice, but no more than that.

No evidence on American hackers should be classified or secret, unless they target government or military(and even then, the only thing that should be supressed from the public court record is the actual classified records that they stole, or details about the vulnerability they used). However, evidence the NSA gathers on foreigners and techniques they use could be classified.

The President should not intervene with diplomats if an American hacker hacks an American company.

I think these make the two situations very different in practice.