I feel like I'm a fairly open-minded guy, but I've just always taken it for granted that Intelligence agencies exist entirely for the purpose of keeping tabs on what other countries and their citizens are doing, in order to know about threats before they become problematic.

I'm curious, do you think it would be unethical for British Intelligence to spy on someone in, say, Pakistan?

There's a huge difference between keeping tabs on suspects and spying on everything that everyone does.

But how do you know a foreigner is a potential threat if you're not spying? If a government has a mandate to protect its citizens from foreign harm, it easily follows that the government would attempt to datamine the communications of the entire world. Why did you expect it to be any different?

This sudden outrage is odd, honestly what did people think the NSA did with their tens of billions of dollars per year budget?

That's not justification for spying on everyone all the time. Giving one organisation the power to look at everybody's communications is extremely stupid.

Definitely not a justification, we completely agree there. My point is that this level of surveillance is absolutely inevitable given the mandate that the government has. The only way we could have prevented this is by actively pushing back.

My comment is more about how so many people seem to be blindsided that this is what the NSA does. It should have been assumed, even expected.