Yeah, I've yet to hear of NK sending submarines to tap undersea cables or storing essentially all internet traffic for future decryption efforts. Their little spy OS seems pretty quaint in comparison.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/intelligence-coup-how...
This thread started with "track and monitor its citizens" and continued "If you think that’s wild, ...", the latter of which was going for the tu quoque, i. e. "the US is worse than North Korea", for which the example is useless.
It would work well in supporting the argument that the NSA (or CIA) had some rather sophisticated technology all the way back in the 80s, at least compared to North Korea, which, frankly, wouldn't be very surprising but at least somewhat sane, which makes it a rather sad commentary on the state of discourse that there is zero doubt which argument the parent comment was going for.
the subs can't be remotely related to US citizens
In other words: most of the proper sense of proportion here is set by what reasonable expectations of privacy are.
I can certainly appreciate the merits of a communication channel that features secure messages in transit. But I don't expect that by default. Privacy expectations should be set by contract or statute.
On the other hand, I definitely expect that conversations in my residence or data on my device should be private by default.
Eavesdropping is a whole different category from intrusion, even if you find both unpleasant.