> >I don't understand why everyone thinks it's terrible if a government surveils its own citizens but it's totally a-ok if it does foreigners.

> What did you think the CIA and NSA was for?

There is a point when foreign signal intelligence project turns into an act of war.

Large scale hacking of phone companies and stealing SMS data gets pretty fucking close to that line, if not outright crosses it.

Not that you should care about my opinion of course, I'm just one of those silly foreigners whose right to privacy you think it's just fine to violate. You have a gov agency whose self-proclaimed job it is to monitor the world and violate everyone's privacy. Congratulations, it is doing its job very well. So, everything is fine, right?

Yes.

Or at least exist at what scale, for what purpose, at "peacetime".

History has taught us over and over huge standing armies will be drawn into conflict (often quite easily) and wars ensue. Perhaps the same is true for huge standing intelligence services - not something we’ve had to deal much with in the past…

You're going to lose that debate, and by engaging in it you're jeopardizing the other winnable issues, like domestic spying. There is zero chance that Obama (or any administration) will simply disband intelligence agencies because it turns out they spy on other countries. You're incredibly naive if you think that has any chance of success. Furthermore, Snowden is now treading into treason territory, and at the very least fits perfectly within the Espionage Act that he was charged with. It's one thing when Snowden exposes potentially illegal and unconstitutional actions by a government agency against the nation's citizens. It's another when he's leaking specific actions against specific foreign governments, potentially to buy himself leverage.

I, personally, would not suggest that intelligence services don’t need to exist.

I would however suspect that civilian intelligence services are overly large, ambitious and funded for the goal of informing America of threats.

That’s a debate I would like to see happen.

-- Massively edited

Not to say that this isn't a noble aspiration, but it is a glaringly naive point of view to say that organizations like the NSA and CIA don't need to exist.

What are they needed for? Who do they benefit, how, and at what cost? Who/what decides when the cost/benefit is acceptable? Nationalism(our rights are more important than theirs)?

There is absolutely nothing naive about questioning whether intelligence agencies ought to exist.

I think the GP's real argument was the "at what scale, for what purpose" bit. I don't think many people want to see intelligence agencies entirely disbanded. But questioning what they do and how much they do it is legitimate.

I don't think the issue is a government surveillance on its own citizens or on citizens of other countries. And, its ridiculous if you think about it. The intelligence services are using a brute force technique of spying on everyone (own citizens and citizens of other sovereign nations) to find a handful of wrong doers. It's analogous to saying if there is a murder then the police considers everyone as a suspect instead of finding any leads and pursuing them.