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Yes, it's bad. But I'm trying to figure out if this is "business as usual" or crossing a line.

I'm not a US citizen so the US spying on me is already scandalous but if the US is doing it, I expect countries that aren't our allies to do the same.

No, the question is this:

The US is doing certain things that seem outrageous.

The US is supposedly an ally of my country.

China is not explicitly an ally (just a trade partner).

So if the US spies on us, that's scandalous but it significantly lowers the bar for what I expect our non-allies to do to us.

It's not whataboutism, it's a precedent by which all future actions are measured. I'm not discounting the news story, I'm asking whether this is just a news story that will be forgotten about in a few weeks or so, or whether this is a total shift in expectations like when we found out what the US was doing to its own allies.