We do know - that they demonstrably have abused their powers. I didn't realise it was possible to know about XKEYSCORE with no context or understanding of the Snowden leaks but GP seems to have missed that the "suits" "in charge of XKEYSCORE", the NSA, have repeatedly illegally wiretapped American citizens, to say nothing of the FISA abuses, Five Eyes, etc. Regardless of how you feel about the three-letter agencies' impacts on the rest of the world, the thought that anyone on Hacker News would consider these programs defensible is shocking.
Name one bad thing that happened to some innocent person because from XKEYSCORE.
I bet you don't even understand how XKEYSCORE works. NSA wasn't illegally wiretapping anyone with it. The whole surveillance program was simply massive data collection, with metadata tracing. It just so happens you can derive a lot of personally identifiable info from the metadata. And you can say thats bad, but then again people really don't give a shit about privacy in the sense that they aren't willing to forgo the comforts of modern apps and devices for actual privacy (for example, see reaction to Tik Tok ban)
On the flip side, we do have evidence of Russia meddling in US politics. We do have foreign nationals commit acts of terror on US soil. We do have Chinese spies and information leaks.
So yea, I consider these programs defensible, because I grew out of my high school libertarian phase, and realize that the world is a bit more complex than "suits in charge".
I sincerely hope one day your understanding of the history of American imperialism is increased along with the ability to clearly read my comment and you finally wonder how you could have ever believed in something so hypocritical.
If you think that XKEYSCORE is used to "wiretap", in the sense that someone goes out and hacks someone's computer or phone, you clearly don't know the tech enough to speak about it.
Which makes your first statement of abuse of power wrong.
My point was that you can't name a single case where someone, even through metadata collection, was targeted through abuse of power (i.e because of a personal reason unrelated to the law), which generally should make you at least question what you believe.
But instead, the way your brain works is that if it can't rationalize some evidence presented to the contrary, you automatically fall back on things that you know are bad, like "American Imperialism", however unrelated it may be. Much in the same way in which MAGA hypocrisy works, where anytime you present any evidence of corruption, the most common response is "well democrats are bad too".
I do wonder if this brainrot within people around the world, not just in US, is irreversible at this point.
