alt Hacker NewsWe do know - that they demonstrably have abused their powers. I didn't realise it was possible to know about XKEYSCORE with no context or understanding of the Snowden leaks but GP seems to have missed that the "suits" "in charge of XKEYSCORE", the NSA, have repeatedly illegally wiretapped American citizens, to say nothing of the FISA abuses, Five Eyes, etc. Regardless of how you feel about the three-letter agencies' impacts on the rest of the world, the thought that anyone on Hacker News would consider these programs defensible is shocking.
Name one bad thing that happened to some innocent person because from XKEYSCORE.
I bet you don't even understand how XKEYSCORE works. NSA wasn't illegally wiretapping anyone with it. The whole surveillance program was simply massive data collection, with metadata tracing. It just so happens you can derive a lot of personally identifiable info from the metadata. And you can say thats bad, but then again people really don't give a shit about privacy in the sense that they aren't willing to forgo the comforts of modern apps and devices for actual privacy (for example, see reaction to Tik Tok ban)
On the flip side, we do have evidence of Russia meddling in US politics. We do have foreign nationals commit acts of terror on US soil. We do have Chinese spies and information leaks.
So yea, I consider these programs defensible, because I grew out of my high school libertarian phase, and realize that the world is a bit more complex than "suits in charge".