The purpose of intelligence agencies is to spy on non-citizens, both in peacetime and in wartime. One might argue that traditionally they focused on public figures in the foreign states and that spying on average foreigners is new; I don't know if that's true, but seems plausible.
It would generally be a dereliction of duty for the NSA/CIA to not spy on non-Americans. The same holds true, modulo agency name and country, for any other country.
Now, if you want to make the argument that national borders should dissolve and that spying on foreigners should become history - or something like that - that's up to you. But spy agency gonna spy.
Come on, say it to my face! You don't believe non-US people have a right to privacy. That's me! Your agencies can do whatever they want to me, but not to you.
You're on the public Internet, you're not "within national borders", and everybody can hear what you just said. Say it to my face. Tell me how you feel that it's just fine to violate my privacy, that it's apparently perfectly fine to pry into my life, hack my phone networks, to gather any possible information there is to know about me and all those around me, just because I'm not a US citizen, and you are. You are better and are entitled to these protections, I don't.
> The same holds true, modulo agency name and country, for any other country.
Not every country believes that their citizens are somehow exceptional and non-citizens can be treated however they please.
I think that, in today's world, everyone, particularly public people of interest to other countries, should reasonably expect to have foreign countries gather information about them, up to and including spying.
For example, if I was doing important security research, I would fully expect to have the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, etc, looking into my work.
I don't believe the US is exceptional. I expect other countries to have interests in US citizens and to carry out their interests to advance their national interest.
This expectation is entirely separate from my opinion of the morality of said act.
If privacy is a human right, it's not (to me, at least) of the same caliber as "life, liberty, and security of person". People behave best because they have internalized social norms, those arguments and attitudes that we proudly expose.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Otherwise, how would you define "liberty" or "security of person"? You're free to do what you want as long as it doesn't encroach on the freedom of others, and if being spied on makes you not want to do some things you ought to be able to do, then that's just tough luck, but not a restriction on liberty or your security? I'd say freedom of action is worthless without freedom of thought and speech, and that you can't pick and choose human rights, or rank them.
Things aren't that simple. Certain rights can certainly override others (your right to life overrides my liberty to shoot you), which implies, if not a ranking, at least complexity. My liberty was only legally maximized when I turned 19: should five-year-olds be able to buy guns? Should I be free to record a conversation we have without my telling you?
A person has liberty if he or she is free to do anything lawful within a just framework of laws that is fairly enforced. Everything you do has consequences, however. Your freedom is thus freedom from having government stopping you from doing things that are within the law, but not freedom from consequences. (Note that article 12, as written, is qualified by the term "arbitrary". According to the right as written, you or I can be interfered with if the reasons for doing so are non-arbitrary.) Absolute privacy rights increase freedom from non-legal consequences -- this is a good thing when your social context is horrible (shun him! he's smoking mj!), but more often than not, removing social consequences is a net loss.
Privacy has a nice "liberty narrative" which makes it easy to defend (as you are doing) in the abstract, because it bears a close relationship to freedom (you are, without a doubt, "more free" if you have more control over what you choose to disclose). In practice, people behave best (on balance) when transparency is maximized, and they behave worst when they have absolute privacy and anonymity (see Tor, 4chan, freenet, etc.). In many game-theoretic contexts, "private information" is what leads to sub-optimal overall outcomes that tend to strongly preference the already advantaged.
Privacy rights, therefore, have much to do with the tension between the goals of the many and the goals of the few. The real problems lie not with privacy per se, but with asymmetries in its distribution.
> The purpose of intelligence agencies is to spy on non-citizens, both in peacetime and in wartime.
No, the purpose of intelligence agencies is to gather and analyze information that might be of use to the nations leaders. Spying -- whether on citizens or foreigners, and whether on people located within the country or abroad -- is often a mechanism used to gather information (though collection from public sources is also a common mechanism.)
And there's nothing really special about the foreign vs. domestic (whether by location or citizenship) axis for "intelligence agencies", generally -- while sometimes the agencies that do domestic and foreign intelligence
gathering are separate, that's not always the case, and certainly not a defining feature of "intelligence agencies."
You are correct - I overspecialized in my comment (and focused too much on the US, which attempts to separate domestic and foreign intelligence)- but I would argue that espionage is a signature of intelligence agencies and their efforts; expecting such agencies not to make significant espionage efforts doesn't really cohere with reality.
That is what I would prefer. I can not think of a good reason why we (Germany) should spy at our friends like France, the UK or the USA. Agencies should gather information about (potentially) dangerous citizens in their country and share this information with other countries. I have also no problem with collecting information in war zones and I include countries hosting terrorists where you can not rely on there agencies to provide good information here.
It would generally be a dereliction of duty for the NSA/CIA to not spy on non-Americans. The same holds true, modulo agency name and country, for any other country.
Now, if you want to make the argument that national borders should dissolve and that spying on foreigners should become history - or something like that - that's up to you. But spy agency gonna spy.