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The NSA engages in industrial espionage: http://www.bbc.com/news/25907502

I believe the key difference here is gathering information on technologies for national security benefit versus gathering information to be used to benefit French businesses.

I think it's naive to trust that the USA is using the NSA's surveillance capabilities for just security and not economic gain:

From http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-hacked-email-a...

"In the space of a single year, according to the internal documents, this operation produced 260 classified reports that allowed US politicians to conduct successful talks on political issues and to plan international investments."

IIRC there are laws saying that any commercially relevant information obtained by NSA is supposed to be forwarded to domestic businesses.

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