This is scary because the direct implication of this event is a creep of power for intelligence agencies, which is not very good to have in a democratic system (because lack of oversight, accountability, significant means to alter democratic process, etc).
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the explicit purpose of intelligence agencies to gather intelligence about foreign countries (allied or otherwise) to further the national interest? I don't really see how this is a creep of power (as opposed to, say, counter-terror activities, where an agency that previously only surveilled foreign powers may now monitor its own citizens).
French intelligence services are using this to ask more money and less restraint right now, that's how funding and manpower comparisons made it in the article. US intel services probably did the same a couple of years back when Obama moaned about chinese spying.
Overall, a significant share of these powers have been and will be used in ways and for goals that are detrimental to the well-being of democratic political systems.
I'm not defending any state spying, but geopolitics is different from individual interactions. Not anticipating the moves of the other nations means risking millions of lives of people from you country. Wars, nuclear wars, economic depression, etc. It's sad but we haven't yet solved many problems to fully become a democratic Earth (e.g. distribution of knowledge, election of politics. which basically are the same problems we see in distributed computing systems).
There is no such thing "national interest." There is only the interest of individuals. Sometimes they align with the majority of people, sometimes they do not.
Why do you assume that this was done not at the direct orders of the executive branch?
The director of the NSA is a general, the NSA is the only intelligence agency that is almost under the direct control of POTUS.
The difference is that we elected the guy doing the overseeing, Barack Obama. In fact we elected him twice. That's democracy. If we don't like what NSA is doing under the President's command, we'll elect a different president, or our elected men and women in Congress can hold the President accountable.
> If we don't like what NSA is doing under the President's command, [...]
For that, you would need oversight, which intel shops typically don't provide. For instance, there's a history of scandals being revealed long after they were done in western democracies.
There's also the matter of being able to effectively implement a political program reducing the powers of intel agencies. To my knowledge this has never happened outside of political upheavals. Even then, if you look at the Church committee report and the Snowden affair, advances seem to be quickly erased.
I wonder how the US government would react if european nations were caught doing it to them (especially Considering the childish reaction after some countries decide to not get involved in the 2nd war in Irak).
Note that I'm not saying they are not doing it (I actually assume everybody does it), but I don't recall seeing any formal proof.
The US government knows that our European allies spy on us all the time. That's been known since the founding of the nation.
They don't make a stink about it because you don't rock the boat when you don't need to. Advise those with sensitive information of how to proceed and move on.
Think about why French intelligence would give this to the press, rather than obviate it either technologically or diplomatically.