[ben_w]

The impression I have — and I’d be very interested to find out if I’m right or wrong — is that governments basically all spy on each other all the time, and they consider this normal and only problematic when it touches certain very specific projects.

Something about it being important to know the capabilities of your friends and your enemies, and to test the quality of your intelligence and counterintelligence assets before it becomes critical: you don’t want to start stupid wars you can’t win, nor waste money fighting wars to end the non-existent threat of non-existent WMDs.

I can’t tell the difference between espionage that gets overlooked, espionage that gets chest-thumping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and espionage that gets kinetic responses, but I assume there must be such divisions.

[KarlKemp]

You'd be wrong. All of the available evidence points to a tiered system, with some countries spying on everyone, some spying on very specific other countries, and some just not doing much at all.

Yes, you can claim that that last category just hasn't been caught yet. But there are some, like the US and Israel, that have been caught several times while others have, so far, escaped notice. Is Belgium so much smarter, or are they maybe just not doing as much?

[kingcharles]

And the funny thing is that most of the spies are actually known to each nation. Whenever you hear about country X has evicted Y number of "diplomats" from the embassy, that is just a few spies getting thrown out to make a point (and of course the evicted country will throw out a few spies in retaliation).

What has been interesting of late is the mass evictions of known Russian spies from even the smallest of nations like Belgium. And of course, Russian has been throwing out Western agents at an equal rate these last few weeks. There are a lot of spies on desk duty right now...

[nonrandomstring]

> The impression I have — and I’d be very interested to find out if I’m right or wrong — is that governments basically all spy on each other all the time

Yes. That's exactly what NSA, GCHQ, MI6 etc are tasked to do.[1]

The problem came when foreign intelligence got confused with domestic intelligence. This is further compounded by the change in procurement of specialist technologies that the army or government offices might once have had. In the 80s a prime-minister would communicate with a special "scrambler" (supplied by the security services and designed against foreign espionage). Today everyone uses the same gear made in China, and the market for offensive cyberweapons is both international and privatised.

Here is a quote from [2]

  "" For complex reasons the US embargo on Huawei, while looking like
  a trade dispute, more or less proves this. Simply; western phones
  have backdoors and remote controls for western governments. Chinese
  phones have backdoors for Communist Party intelligence
  apparatus. Each spies on their own citizens and everybody is happy
  (except the citizens that end up in camps). It's the presence of the
  other's spyware within the respective borders/markets that is the
  problem, do you see?

  So when these powers fell out, or failed to reach agreement on data
  sharing, this escalated into an issue with clear symmetry. We see
  that products by Apple, Google or Amazon are to be trusted no more
  than Huawei handsets. Indeed, the safest phone for a Chinese citizen
  is probably an Apple iPhone, whereas the safest phone for a western
  civilian would be a Huawei, because historically, people are most
  risk from their *own* government's domestic surveillance than a
  foreign government's international surveillance. ""

The upshot of this is that offensive cyberweapons, which are indiscriminate, persistent, reusable and infinitely replicatable at near zero cost (all the worst qualities of a weapon on par with bioweapons) affect all strata of society. Politicians, military generals, schoolteachers and pizza delivery guys are equally exposed. This marks a significant transition that blurs the boundaries between civil and military war, as the current Russo-Ukraine conflict shows. We're all soldiers now.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-20...

[2] https://digitalvegan.net