Jack Goldsmith paints a picture of a US IC that targets private companies in order to collect intelligence - an Occidental Persistent Threat: If the suggestion is that the USG does not generally collect against foreign firms, it is wrong... Given the USG’s broad economic interests, and the tight link between economics and national security, one can assume that NSA collection of commercial and economic information is very robust.
He then goes on the argue that the US should not back down in targeting these firms: It will also be interesting to see, if this scale-back comes to pass, how the USG will credibly convey that it has scaled back its global snooping. It is not obvious to me that it can credibly convey this information, even if the restraints were embodied in public law. And that fact might be the best argument that it should not scale back, since little concrete credibility can be gained (for the USG or U.S. IT firms), and much can be lost on the intelligence front.
In other words, there is no point in passing laws that constrain our intelligence services because no one believes that we obey our own laws anyway. If the US isn't going to back down in targeting private companies, than foreign countries aren't going to back down either. The result is going to be a cyber cold war in which everyone who uses the Internet is a target. Over the long term this will have dramatic effects on the architecture of computer networks and the openness of the Internet in general as a platform for collaboration. People are already removing data from foreign cloud services because they are worried that it is exposed. If their systems are constantly targeted by spies when they use the Internet, they are going to use the Internet less often. Good fences make good neighbors. We aren't going to have a global village if we can't respect each others privacy. We may be standing at the high-water mark - the place where the great wave of human interaction and interconnectivity that has been unleashed over the past few decades by the development of the Internet has finally broken, and is beginning to roll back. Lawfare › Reflections on U.S. Economic Espionage, Post-Snowden | 
