This is a simpsons reference.
They thought there was an alien in the forest. Turns out it was Mr. Burns who did his medical treatments (quoted above) and he would be high as a kite wondering through the forest at night and the glow is from working at the nuclear plant for so long.
I like how you throw in ‘even the Americans’ with the spying groups. We definitely spy in all our allies. And in return we encourage our allies to spy on us. It is a very calculated political game where we (all the allied countries) pass legislation and safeguards in our respective home countries and declare our citizens free of authoritarian government surveillance, but then work with the other countries spy agencies to do it for us. We intentionally put in the backdoors in our peoples networks and hand the keys to our partners just so we can say ‘well I wasn’t spying on you. That would be illegal!’ But in the end it is effectively the same. If the allied government finds anything of interest they just send a notification over. We each have boundaries that we respect in spying on each other’s people too. It is almost a formallity by this point.
Ah yes, the 4X buisness strategy. Building an empire through four core pillars:
eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate
Lots of research has been done on this. But I would highly recommend watching the YouTube video that was posted by the top commenter instead of trying to dig through what’s out there.
LegalEagle on youtube has already talked about this. There is already a law I place that covers this exact scenario, and with punishments and fines already in place. It’s 1,000$ per incident to the victim and up to 180 days jail for the offender. Keep in mind, the law was written to protect the IRS and fuck over the peons who would be glad to receive 1k$ and don’t really have anything to hide.