[vkou]

Do you want them to be held more, or less accountable, than, say, the US government spying on a French aerospace firm? Or on an energy company, and selling their secrets to a state-friendly domestic firm? [1]

What kind of sanctions do you recommend against countries practicing industrial espionage against their allies? What about their enemies? Are you ready to apply them to all transgressors, or just ones that you consider enemies?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial... - the cherry on top was that the victimized company here was later banned from doing business in the US.

[sillysaurusx]

Yeow, I guess the truth hurts. Yes, you seem to be correct, and I personally found it somewhat shocking (though perhaps not surprising) that the NSA did exactly what we're denouncing China for. I suppose you could argue that "there is only one documented case of the US doing it, but dozens or hundreds of cases of China doing it," which might be fair. Still, kinda not cool. Let Germany have their patent on wind turbine designs, or whatever.

In fact, that seems borderline incompetent espionage on the NSA's part. We submitted a patent that was basically identical to theirs, shortly before they did. Really? Hmm, I wonder how anyone could have figured out that something strange was going on?

The referenced article is also interesting: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/electronic-spies-torture...

Apparently Germany's intelligence services are forbidden to participate in industrial espionage, which includes defense against espionage. Therefore they were aware of the espionage but unable to inform the target company. They could only sit and watch.