alt Hacker NewsBut.. the US doesn't perform mass surveillance on foreign people only when it's at war. It doesn't perform mass surveillance only on adversarial nations it potentially could be at war either.
This absolutely is about privacy.
> I'm not worried about foreign governments spying on Americans, as long as the US government is aligned. I'm worried about my own government becoming misaligned
Those foreign governments are spying on Americans and then sharing the results with the US government because the US government is misaligned with the interests of its own people
The United States gets to spy on countries when it's in the interest of the United States to do so. This isn't complicated. We get to spy on quite literally whoever we want abroad, within various legal and well established parameters, at at the risk of offending the governments of the spied-on. "It's only okay for the United States to spy on foreigners when they're in a shooting war with them" is silly.