It's worth pointing out the companies in question were communications companies, and if anyone in the world has foreign signals intelligence agencies that is exactly what they're going to be targeting, not for economic reasons but to maintain future capability.
The CEO that was surprised by this revelation is simply incompetent or lying. (Or both). If you work on satellite ground stations you're in the game and need to act appropriately.
16 employees, including engineers were targeted. No prizes for guessing how one becomes a cooperating company in PRISM and similar programs if the CEO says "No."
What makes satellite communication special? Is it okay to monitor the CEO of every communication company? If so, is it any different for non-US governments to monitor the CEO's of US tech companies?
I would bet that foreign countries (at least China, Russia, Israel and France) are at least trying to, and any competent CEO of an international communications company should be taking reasonable measures to protect their own and their clients confidentiality.
Arguing the rights or wrongs of the agency action misses the point: it's inevitable that someone is going to try it, so take counter measures.
This is why in the fuss over the NSA we shouldn't ignore the fact that Google, Facebook etc. are encouraging bad security practices by creating giant repositories of everyone's information. It just happens, this time, to be the NSA, but it could be any government, or even organised crime, and the only ways to stop all of them are by acting prudently in the first instance.
So even though the US is allied to the state I am a citizen of, should I ever work for any sort of communications company, I'll be fair game for US intelligence services.
Got it. For practical purposes, the alliance is worthless then.
Though it seems states used to act more publicly ashamed of it, espionage has been a part of the interactions between states allied or not since the beginning of time. Suggesting otherwise is incredibly naïve as is supposing military alliance with the United States is worthless.
Games on the big board are irrelevant compared to the intelligence service of a nation state ripping your life appart because they want your access credentials to do some industrial espionage.
Because this is what this is. A nation state coming down with all his power on some of us worthless pawns because we work in otherwise harmless infrastructure businesses. How is that being compensated for by the abstract benefits of an allegiance in "the war of the systems" or some other bullshit.
Being German I'd argue that a problem is that Germany relies on the US to conduct intelligence for them and hence ignores the fact that the NSA is violating the rights of it's citizens on a massive scale.
I could understand it for a country doing it for it's direct adversaries (e.g India and Pakistan and vice versa). That's what it was historically been connected to in any case.
I especially don't want a 10000-pound gorilla country with a constant history of war, imperialism and a racist feeling of "we are the chose country of God and a great experiment" doing it globally and using it for economic and military control.
So, no, I don't like Germany doing it. Or France. Or UK. Or China. Or Japan. And especially I don't like the big kahuna doing it.
Oddly, I'm not outraged by this. Countries spy on each other, including private organizations of other countries. And they do so in secret, and to whatever extent they can get away with. We can argue all day long about whether it's the right thing to do, but the behavior has, at the very least, a long history behind it. It seems that the expected behavior is to just get angry and roll some heads when it's found out, and then get right back to it.
And yet, I'm outraged by the exact same NSA behavior when applied to the USA. What's the difference? The difference is that Germans don't vote in the USA, and therefore the NSA isn't protecting itself in the context of our country, but (presumably) protecting our country in the context of the world. There's a lack of incest, recursion, self-reenforcement...however you want to put it. Sure, the opportunity for abuse exists, but it's not a systemic risk, unlike the systemic risk caused by any intelligence agency doing blanket surveillance on it's own citizens.
That it an acceptance of a world in constant information war without friends and allies. It implies a massive global expenditure on both attack and defence. Now some is definitely going to happen on critical issues but I would expect them to be at least embarrassed when caught to act as a deterrent prevent it being done too casually.
I'm British and GCHQ have been eager partners with the NSA and equally invasive in the UK (although possibly without breaking rules because there largely aren't any).
I think we agree then: embarrassed, yes. But outraged, no. My point is that there is a qualitative difference between untargeted domestic mass surveillance and targeted foreign surveillance. The former is a known threat to democracy; the latter is distasteful and it would be better not to exist, but it's part of the international landscape since forever.
I believe outrage is appropriate and that the NSA and the USA should be pretty deeply embarassed (and GCHQ and the UK).
Foreign surveillance can be a threat (blackmail) to foreign democracies. Breaking into computer systems is also criminal in most jurisdictions. A government caught committing crimes in another country without very good reason should expect severe diplomatic and even economic sanctions, involved staff and those giving the orders should expect arrest if they visit the country spied on (those computer hacking in EU could expect arrest anywhere in Europe under the European arrest warrant). I'm not sure it would be wise for NSA bosses to holiday in Europe (without the protection of diplomatic immunity).
The CEO that was surprised by this revelation is simply incompetent or lying. (Or both). If you work on satellite ground stations you're in the game and need to act appropriately.