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Breaking news from the Spiegel (German weekly center left newspaper) on the sabotage of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline:
While the article itself doesn't speculate at all what this could mean, commenters are less reluctant. General tenor: this indicates that the saboteur was a state actor within NATO, probably the US, maybe Poland with US backing, and Sweden is paying ransom in order to be able to join NATO.
I keep hearing this "I bet all the other intelligence agencies wiretap the NSA too" line, but do we have any evidence for this? What would even be the mechanism by which they do this? I've never heard of a French or Lithuanian spy network in Langley being busted, nor do the Americans host BND collection sites. It always struck me as a likely cope because the unbridled supremacy that would be implied by America unilaterally keeping tabs on friend and foe and nobody being able or willing to stand up against it would offend the sensibilities of the public in both America and its allies (with or without scare quotes). Blue-tribe Americans, too, laughed about "Team America World Police" jokes, but it was always an uncomfortable sort of laughter. For all we know, combined US soft and hard power does really reign that supreme. Out of all the world's intelligence agencies, I would personally maybe trust Israel's to find out if the US ran a reasonably well-compartmentalised operation to blow up the pipelines, and that's only because they have the political clout to prevent the US from unleashing its full counterintel powers against them.
What do your priors expect to see if it were true?
There's a lot of problems to overcome just in terms of getting to the point of publicizing. Who, specifically, is detecting this violation, and how? If it's spying on the NSA, the NSA would presumably be able to discovery/track/identify the culprit... but if they're identifying the culprit through their covert means, that would implicitly mean spying on the culprit in terms. In otherwords, 'in the course of spying on X, we discovered X was spying on us.'
Probably not a good start, but also- why would you publicize it? What's the gain?
If, hypothetically, the French were discovered trying to infiltrate the NSA, what's the gain in publicizing it? They already were willing to assume the risk of discovery. Are you going to try and escalate retaliation, break the US-French alliance, so that they... presumably spy on you less, having broken the partnership and thus increasing the need of the French government to know what the Americans intend to do? Why not try and blackmail/leverage the secret information instead, to get concessions/favors? Why reveal this to anyone at all, when you can use the discovered attempt as free security testing and patch the hole in your system, without telling the French you know that they knew, or telling anyone else 'HEY GUYS THERE'S AN EXPLOIT THAT YOU MIGHT FIND ELSEWHERE.'
And this is without the risk of retaliation. One of the dynamics of spy partnerships is not just the shared capabilities and benefits, but the shared complicity. The NSA partnerships with various countries in Europe are a matter of public record, and it's probably not a coincidence that Merkel conspicuously dropped the 'friends don't spy on friends' line and her government conspicuously dropped the subject of NSA spying on German leaders after German media in 2015 started breaking stories of German espionage on Europeans friends and partners for the US.
So, hypothetically, let's say that a European country spies on the US/NSA. What, specifically, do you think the US government would do upon discovery? Publicize it, or utilize it?
Sorry for the late response, but I'm a bit confused that you seem to only consider the possibility that e.g. the French successfully spying on the US would be revealed by the US. Considering the power gradient between France and the USA and the discomfort many Americans themselves have with their government wielding its power abroad (to say nothing of the non-Americans, wrt the American government), the thing I'd expect to see, if France did that, would be France to use its findings publicly: e.g. if the US did something against the interests of France, like, say, disrupting a hypothetical Russia-France pipeline or scooping a real France-Australia arms deal, to drop some information in public of seedy things that the US got up to, whether it is the disruption itself or something else that the US would lose status over if it got confirmation by something with the stature of the French government. (CIA rendition flights? Funding of unsavoury rebellions? Bribes?)
That we haven't seen such an instance of an uneasily allied government working to lower the status of the US (ever, as far as I know) seems to imply that either there is no obtainable information that would achieve that (which strikes me as unlikely, considering the above three examples which are almost certainly factual + Snowden cache details), they never stand anything to gain from that (which... I guess I can't rule out, in particular in the shape of the US credibly threatening any allied security service that would dare participate in this) or they don't actually have the information.
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Lithuanians won’t be doing that, obviously, given that they are a tiny country with population smaller that Tampa, Fl metro area, and very little capacity to act on any scoops they might get from US. But, for example, Israel spies in US are regularly caught. See, eg. this
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