> 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.
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.