My opinion may be shared by naive or uninformed people, but I am neither naive nor uninformed. Rather, I am sick of pessimistic attitudes (like your own) getting in the way of actually solving the world's problems.
You say we can't afford to stop spying because other people haven't stopped spying on us. They tell themselves the same thing. How bout we man up and set a ****ing precedent?
Scenario: NATO ceases espionage/counterespionage tomorrow.
Results: China gains even larger economic and technological advantages, at the expense of Western powers. Goods under embargo or sanction (including weapons, software, and tech) make their way to nations like Iran, Syria, and countless other totalitarian human rights abusers. Net result: internal democracy movement in Iran has no hope in hell of success, "Arab Spring" loses momentum as regimes are better able to conduct surveillance and counter-insurgency operations against their own citizenry (since the Western intelligence apparatus that was actually capable of causing disarray is now defunct). North Korea successfully mounts invasion of Seoul as early-warning HUMINT sources have been eliminated, and NATO is militarily caught unawares. Pakistan/Afghanistan resume more overt support of Al-Quaeda-inspired activity in the Middle East. Europe loses its capability to detect and counter extremist operations on their home soil.
Each and every single one of those results is not only possible, its plausible. That's not fear-mongering or pessimism, that's a healthy understanding and respect for the importance of the work intelligence agencies do. The trouble is, intelligence only gets discussed when it fails: nobody actually knows or understands how much work goes on behind the scenes unless it fails to prevent a problem. The attacks on September 11, 2001 were a fantastic example of this - US overseas HUMINT sources were severely cut in the late 80s and throughout the 1990s, with increasing reliance on technological solutions. The signs were there, the people to read them weren't.
Cut back a little further in history. The main reason the Cold War ended is because the US came to the realization (courtesy of intelligence gathering) that they could actually out-spend the Soviets. The collapse of the USSR came about for a whole host of colliding reasons, but the catalyst was the realization that the USSR was essentially broke - information which came to light because of intelligence gathering.
If we'd like to skip back another couple decades, part of the reason the Cold War became the arms escalating-conflict it did was a failure in counterintelligence - namely, the direct loss of atomic weapons secrets from the United States to the USSR in the first place. Granted, the USSR had a program in place, but some estimates put them as much as 10 years behind the Allies at the end of WW2 - right up until those secrets were taken. Now, considering the lives lost and misery wrought in Eastern Europe as a large part of the expansion of the USSR (made possible in part by weapons-equivalency), that's a pretty spectacular intelligence failure.
Back during WW2, there were numerous intelligence successes and failures. The story of ENIGMA is relatively well-known; the extent of SAS infiltration behind German lines from 1943-45 isn't, but it was significant. The Germans had a few of their own, with fairly high-level infiltration in Britain that permitted them to gauge the British reaction before and when war first broke out. They also had some failures; had they known quite how close Britain's air force was to total destruction during the Battle of Britain, WW2 might have had a very different ending. The same is true of Operation Overlord - Allied intelligence made a massive effort at misinformation regarding timing and location of the D-Day landings, an effort the Germans actually largely saw right through; it was Hitler's interference on the Atlantic Wall that partially accounted for the successes on June 6, 1944.
Then again, there's the Nazis military rise to reflect on as well. Had British and French intelligence been more capable (and their leaders better listeners), the German military expansion in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles might have been caught much earlier, and the reaction more harsh.
I can keep going back here, but I really don't see the need. Intelligence and counterintelligence is an essential part of security operation in every country. It works. It saves lives. If we do as you suggest and "set a precedent," everyone who doesn't can and will promptly take advantage of it. Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, there are a lot of people on this planet who harm each other for no reason other than they are "different." I sincerely hope that you never actually need to learn that lesson firsthand. So yes, your opinion is naive and uninformed.
