| > We can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in important markets with publicly available information. How can you possibly know that, are you claiming to be privy to the forecasts generated by the information gathered by US spies? Further, as stated later, spying is the status quo, if spying stopped wholesale wouldn't keeping information private be significantly more valuable? > Reason 1 . . . literally any spying could be justified this way. I don't give a solitary care about the spying a foreign government does. Why should I? They don't have jurisdiction over me. I care about what it does with that intel, but that is completely separate, which gets us to your Reason 2. > Essentially anything that's outside of the status quo is suddenly classified as a risk. Basically our spy agencies' jobs become protecting the entrenched interests of those already in power No, that isn't the job of spies, they gather intelligence. You are confusing other government actions with spying. > Reason 3 Again, do you have some sort of inside track on the DoD(or some other 3 letters)? You have concocted a hypothetical about a Joe Shmoe, being caught in a dragnet filter. Is that actually a real problem? Or just a hypothetical about where this slippery slope goes. Overall I think the burden of proof is on the group who wants to go against the status quo; nations constantly spy on one another. Justify why we shouldn't spy, rather than pointing out it's pitfalls. |
In the "realpolitik" environment you mentioned, when you lose control of your private information, you lose control of what's done with that information. That's is a good reason to care about protecting information and not regard this as "completely separate".
An example that people mention a lot in the domestic context is that laws and governments can change, so that information that was innocuous before could be sensitive in the future.
Someone doesn't need to have jurisdiction over you in order to harm you with your secrets. They could taunt you about them, they could blackmail you with them, they could use them to compete with or undermine your business, they could pass them to your government as a tip, they could reveal them to your political opponents...
You might say that this is all Reason 2 and not Reason 1 material, but if a government has unauthorized access to secret information of its choice, it's going to be hard to control or predict how it may use that information against your interests later. But, you might say, I also can't actually control whether they get unauthorized access to my secrets, so I just have no power over them at all, so why even talk about it?
Well, I'd say that lots of people who read HN have practical opportunities in their careers to engage in espionage or not, to make it harder or easier, to expose it or not, and so on. Governments are going to ask some people reading this thread to do them favors. They can't necessarily guarantee the safety of their own information, but they can significantly affect the safety of other people's information. It matters whether they think that's desirable or not!