TBGO: I Spy, with My Little Eye...

Woody notez that a lotta folks all around the world seem to think Prez. LowBarry's spying and intel-gathering and surveillance activities have been especially egregious and excessive.
Codwswallop. Balderdash. Poppycock! They're NOT.

They are perfectly proportional to the need and the ability of the US State to protect itself via information gathering. No world power could even contemplate participation in global politics without EXTENSIVE, COMPREHENSIVE, and RELIABLE intelligence, both foreign and domestic.
EVERY previous regime in the 20th Century, at least, has extended its intelligence tentacles as far as they were technologically and financially able.
They'd have been criticized, pilloried, and probably fired if they HADN'T.
The reach under Prez LowBarry's regime has perhaps been greater than hitherto, but if previous regimes were less intrusive, it was NOT for lack of trying. I know. I was in the USAF branch of the NSA in the '60s.
And it is NOT going to stop!~
There will be NO diminution intelligence gathering, no interference, no reduction. Nagahapun. Not now, not ever. In the world or "real-politik," it CANNOT be ANY other way.
No matter what ANY pol asserts, declares, or promises, it will continue and increase.
Somebody may throw a modest legislative wrap over the naked acts of surveillance--see, e.g., the Church Committee.
But they will NEVER act to interfere in ANY meaningful way. There will be no budgetary restrictions, no "ethical" ("ethical Intel" = world-class oxymoron) restrictions, no end to it, in absolute certainty!
Anything anybody--President, pope, your sainted mither--says otherwise is just a coverup and a lie.
Business will go on as usual.
And it's "Big Business" now.
Nobody fucks with business if it's big enough. With 20+ Govt bureaus devoted entirely to intel-gathering and analysis, and over 2000 PRIVATE 'security contractors' on the job, with budgets in the trillions, it's too big to stop or to fail.
Seemingly forgotten in the current contretemps is the fact USer 'regimes" have been carrying out varieties of peaceful and violent of counter-intel on USer citizens since the 1880s.
They typically spied then "only" on 'dissidents' like labor (Wobblies) or civil rights activists, anarchists, immigrants, colored people, and students. They were often vicious, violent, and bloody: Ask, for example, the Black Panthers, or, before them, the Molly Maguires.
One notices, with some irony, that people's tolerances for "govt. surveillance" were a lot HIGHER when (1) they didn't think themselves as possible targets for it, and (2) when the guy running the show was white.