This is sadly true, but I think we also need to reject that this is the new normal. We need to continue to push back firmly on secret government request without oversight.
You can't put the genie back into the bottle. It has already escaped. In our days, surveillance is being performed by all governments and many private companies. For US to be the only country that doesn't do it, it would be uncompetitive. We have to accept the new reality - ever since digital cameras became popular (year 2000) and ever since cell phones became packed with sensors and always on connectivity (and continuous auto-updates), hard drives cheap and large, face recognition software efficient - there has been no way to stop surveillance. It is an emergent situation based on a confluence of technologies.
We need AI to protect privacy, capable of detecting information leaks and unintended exposures right in the browser and OS, similar to an antivirus that is always scanning the data flowing in the system. We need to have software educating people about consequences and making it really easy to remain private. It won't solve the problem fully, it's impossible to do that today.
In our days, surveillance is being performed by all governments and many private companies. For US to be the only country that doesn't do it, it would be uncompetitive.
Governments spy on other nations businesses, then pass the information back to their companies who process to undercut the competition (because they have all the information)
'According to the indictment, five hackers “stole trade secrets” which allowed Chinese companies to undercut their American competitors, or gave them “insight into [their] strategy and vulnerabilities”. '
It's a false equivalence to say that "everyone does it".
1. It's unclear how surveillance does anything for a countries competitiveness. If we're talking security, the US's competitive edge in technology should have enabled them to completely reshape world affairs to their liking long ago. If they can be duped bit some sadistic middle-eastern ophthalmologist in the way they have, it shows how useless those skills are.
Economically, the benefits of surveillance are especially limiting. You may be able to support a few "national heroes" like Boeing here and there, or win a few tenders with your knowledge of some interior ministers passion for really strange pornography, but the economic effects are negligible.
2. "Everyone does it" is a really really bad excuse for something morally repugnant. When did we start measuring morality on scale relative to others?
3. Not everyone does. In fact, barely anyone does it, and even fewer use it for economic competitiveness. Even discounting places like Luxemburg or Qatar because they use non-replicable features for their success, I'd point at the Netherlands, Austria, Canada or Denmark as countries that are successful even though they almost certainly lack the ability to play that game on any level comparable to the US.
4. Even you think it's naive to expect moral leadership in a world of race-to-the-bottom competition, there are long-established processes to avoid playing the prisoner's dilemma with the rights of everyone on earth: cooperation, embodied in the WTO, the ICC, the Oxford Manual of Style, START 1-3, RFC 2616, or actually anything else that is collectively called "international law". I know americans hate the concept because they really don't get a foreigner, of all people, could disagree with them but just underneath the surface these systems have worked extremely well for everyone.
5. It may be right to try to solve these issues technologically. Such solutions may even be preferable because they don't require trust, or the expectation of mora; behavior from everyone. But I'd still prefer a political solution because there is a universe of problems that cannot be solved technologically and I fear a world where we've given up on expecting people's behavior to be limited by anything but feasibility.
So yes, if you can create a protocol or an AI that gives people power over their data do publish it, if you can teach people to use technology, do so. But don't join the cynical masses that don't expect anything from their leaders, or declare ruthless competition as the only "rational" choice, or deny humanity's ability to give shape to their fate in the face of the downward pressure of game theory.
Well, new in the sense that, post Snowden, there was an immense increase in the number of mostly-facsimile files documenting the mass surveillance. I don't remember earlier programs like Carnivore getting the same level of public documentation and confirmation.
