[001sky]

These are fair points, but I think the GP comment above was referring as much to political economy type espionage.

Say, for example, china wants to spy on a military contractor. Unless the NSA is sharing its secure pigeon network with every US defense contractor (and many of them, large and small) some pretty important US national security assets might be in play. So, perhaps not "state secrets" but things like technology inside of some tactical weapons guidance systems, or similar. The downside for the NSA of sharing any secret-pigeon networks would op-sec goes down as info dispersal goes up.

* Also for companies like a tesla or a space-x who may have purely industrial know how.

[antocv]

Tactical weapons guidance systems, tesla and space-x, I believe those are in the category of "NSA will secure this with a bit more tools than given to the public as recommendations".

It could be methods like increasing security for those companies gmail accounts - on the Google internal network and all, closing all normal backdoors on Tesla employee computers, installing NSAs own intrusion detection system on them and such.

And to top it off, feed any Chinese and Russian hackers misinformation through honeypots and "accidents".

In Sweden for example during cold war it was quite popular to install extra instrumentation on jets and provide "just for the soviets" technical documentation - seed confusion and such.