> In any case, being spied on by a foreign country is considerably less bad than being spied on by your own. In the wet dreams of conspiracy theorists, our government spies on its citizens to discover their political views, and then imprisons those with views it doesn't like. There's no equivalent evil that France's government could pull off.

Arresting you when you have to enter France for business or personal reasons is one possibility.

EDIT: If France has some agents in your country there's a lot of evil they could pull off even without you leaving the country.

I really don't agree that that's equivalent, but I understand your point. Certainly if the power balance were different, it might be a legitimate fear. (If the french government gave me problems, it would be pretty easy for me to find protection from my own government. Wouldn't be so easy if I was in Pakistan, looking for protection from the US, I suppose.)

I do agree we should refrain from mass surveillance on non-US citizens, but I don't think that achieving that is realistic at this juncture. The intelligence community is in excited-puppy mode about all the cool things they can do with the internet[1], and it'll be a bit before they and their elected overlords figure out what's useful, what's not, and how surveillance can be better performed without playing godzilla to the city of rights.

For now, what I think is reasonable is a more straightforward, open disclosure of what and how the NSA monitors.

And now I need to stop commenting on this article until I've actually read the proposed reform in its entirety. (And you all should too. Hah.)

[1] Calling it an "insurance policy", really? "We've never had to use it, but it's too cool to give up."

In my view, the "right" policy is that we will respect the rights of all people, but not guarantee that we will protect the rights of anyone but our own.

other countries don't seem to have the same attitude that america has.

in general terms, in most places, the law is applies equally to everyone in the country[+].

in contrast, in the usa, many things apparently depend on whether you are a citizen or not.

those are quite different approaches. both can be made to work (neither "falls apart"). the american one appears arbitrary and unfair to me.

[+] obviously there are exceptions - immigration, for example.

For the purposes of NSA surveillance, the U.S. is like the rest of the world; if you are legally inside the U.S., Fourth Amendment protections apply without regard to citizenship.

If you've so much as ever applied for a green card, you are now a "U.S. person" as far as NSA is concerned.

U.S. treatment of non-citizens outside of the U.S. is different in some (not all) ways, that much is true. But other countries take that tack as well. E.g. even privacy-friendly Germany allows their foreign intel agency, BND, to spy on the communications of non-Germans.

One of the biggest problems with this view though is intelligence sharing policies among nations. Even if the US can't spy on American, but the French can, you still have the possibility that some politically connected multinational organization can get information about American political adversaries through their French intelligence connections.