Unless you have a seriously depressing sex-life, it's hard for a single agent to seduce 100s or 1000s (or more) clerks based on recorded behaviour of the entire connected part of the human race for the past few years in a few minutes.
So it's worse in one way because of scale.
In general spies break laws, that's what's make them special. It's why it's "ok" to torture spies, or kill them, or hold them in a hole -- they're not considered soldiers, when (if) they're caught, they are treated as scum (or as we say these days, as terrorists).
I don't think anyone's saying: "Oh, we're mighty miffed you've stolen all our data. We'd be ok with you just coming over on foot, seducing a few, killing a few, and stealing our military and industrial secrets."
No-one's ok with that either. As for the American People, they are (rightfully) miffed because their so-called foreign intelligence services, that are supposed to break laws only abroad, are violating privacy on a scale that makes the Stasi look like child's play.
If a US agent seduced me and installed a back door on my computer to access the networks I have access to -- and I found out -- I'd be mighty upset about that, too. And I'd try to help counter intelligence get hold of the perpetrator. But that's not bloody likely to happen, is it?
Now, we pretty much know that any value target (network, and by extension admin) is reachable in a few keystrokes. The effort needed is minimal, to quote Sarah Connor: "No one is ever safe."
What kind of question is that even? If you'd told me before the Snowden/NSA scandal that the NSA or GCHQ were _blackmailing_ clerks, I'd have called it spy fiction.
To my knowledge, it was only publically proven that the Russians use these tactics, but the US?
And now you are telling me that the NSA compromising the informational integrity of thousands of sysadmins is not surprising since they already used unethical TV-drama bullshit in the past?
This raises so many questions. Do you have examples of the NSA blackmailing a clerk?
"To my knowledge, it was only publically proven that the Russians use these tactics, but the US?"
I've always found it more likely that if any country has been proven to be using these tactics, then Occam's razor states that they all are (if they can afford to).
Intelligence agencies may be answerable to governments in theory, but human nature (as well as game theory) show that lack of independent oversight leads to manipulation of the rules. Doesn't matter what country you come from, if you can get away with something with little risk of detection, let alone retribution, you do.
This is why laws exist, and why it's inexcusable that any sector of any government should be immune to them.
> To my knowledge, it was only publically proven that the Russians use these tactics, but the US?
This is a very strange belief. I mean I prefer living under US rule to living under Russian rule but the idea that the US has clean hands is laughable. I'm curious -- did you grow up inside the US? I've found that perceptions from inside the US reality-distortion bubble are very different from perceptions even a few hundred kilometres away.
I grew up in Germany during the 90s. Our view was that, while the US doesn't have the figurative "clean hands" (insert vague reminiscence of some half-knowledge about things that happened South America), they were rather "civilized" about things.
I DO REALIZE NOW that this was of course a distorted picture of reality, which I think dawned on me around the time the illegal rendition/secret torture prison affair of the CIA came to light.
However, compared to the Americans, the Russians were never _too_ discrete about the rough practices of their intelligence agencies. This is what I was refering to: To the current state of my knowledge (which, admittedly I did not update with even a Google search) there are publically known instances of the Russians crushing private individuals by inserting HUMINT into their lives, whereas I don't know of any example involving an American service.
Maybe this is also why the Belgacom hack was so shocking to me. I had not previously thought that they (NSA GCHQ) would take apart some poor schmuck who happens to work at the wrong company just to gain access.
On a more general note, to me it just seems that bringing down the power of a governmental intelligence agency on an innocent bystander for the sake of a "shortcut" is unethical.
That's never what these sorts of comparisons imply. It's more of an "it's not different to something else... so if you actually cared about the principle of the thing rather than harms to your specially-empathizable in-group, you would have been angry all along, rather than just starting now. Thus, your anger is not particularly selfless, and your battle-cry does not deserve to be rallied around."
Technique #3 - 'TOPIC DILUTION'
4. Use a straw man.
10. Associate opponent charges with old news.
The problem with the Gentleman's guide is that (on purpose) it is hard to distinguish someone who disagrees with you, someone who is trolling (a little bit), and someone actively using it.
So common for wrongdoers to resort to such rationalization to justify their wrongdoings.
To help in snapping out of the cultic mindset, replace "country" with "organization". For instance, Scientologists had the same mindset with their Snow White Operation.
Obviously, I don't know the answer but I don't think it's too far-fetched to imagine that an agent of one government (e.g. a female KGB agent working in the U.S.) might attempt to seduce someone in a privileged position (in other words, "with access to specific desired information") in another country's government (e.g. a male physicist working at LLNL).
And, immediately after having written the above, I suddenly recalled a few portions of the SF86[0] and, based upon their existence, I'm inclined to believe it happens much more than what I would initially have expected.
It may be distasteful to you but it is the traditional work of spies in service to their country.