[WS:] Which is the question how abstract and generalizable my analysis is.
To which my answer is, I don't think it matters. I find abstractions rather useless in analyzing social phenomena - they are a Procrustean bed for social relations. I do not expect an observation made in context A to be valid in context B, and if it is, chances are it has nothing useful to say about either A or B.
So to answer your question - prohibitions against spying, assassinations, torture and other violations of individual rights are aspirational ideals.
It would be very nice if everyone observed these principles. It also would be nice to have the world free of disease and natural disasters. In reality, neither of it is going to happen.
Therefore, the guiding principle should not be rigid adherence to some abstract ideal but a more nuanced view of what is the most justifiable course of action given a particular set of circumstances. So if the aspirational ideal is the protection of human life, the guiding principle is what course of action mininimizes the loss of that life. Violating someone's privacy seems a small price to pay to save somebody's life.
Killing one person to save two people seems a reasonable course of action if an option avoiding deaths altogether is not available. I see no useful purpose of torture other than satisfying sadistic impulses of some deranged individuals, so I do not see many circumstances in which it would be a justified course of action. Except perhpas when it comes to animal research in which torture is often justified in the name of science.
Again, we can debate how much of it is really justified and how much is used to protect some rich assholes from law suits. BTW, I do not make a sharp distinction between human and animal life - if killing one is justified so is the killing of the other, and if killing one is not justified neither is the killing of the other.
But you get the drift - everything depends on the context. This is not the same as moral relativism, because it acknowledges fixed aspirational ideals and the obligation to uphold these ideals to the extent possible. But it moves away from doctrinaire rigidity of what passes for left political discourse nowadays. To apply this to the Snowden affair, a justifiable course of action would involve at least two evaluative processes: 1. evaluation to which government intelligence gathering is justifiable, i.e. makes necessary sacrifices to achieve a greater good and 2. evaluation what course of action is justifiable in response to such intelligence gathering i.e. has the greatest potential for bringing government action back to balance without sacrificing a greater good (e.g. regulation of business activity). I am not sure about 1 but regarding 2 I am pretty sure that the left reacted rather hysterically.
While we are at that, the Snowden affair demonstrates that the left is intellectually dead - all it can do is throwing fits in reaction to what others do and write bad literature about it, but otherwise it has nothing fruitful to offer.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."