The National Security Agency's surveillance of innocent Americans without a warrant is illegal and unconstitutional. In a narrowly defeated amendment, congressman Justin Amash (a Michigan Republican) and a bipartisan group of over 200 members of Congress recently voted to defund the NSA's warrantless spying on US citizens. But obscured by the debate over domestic spying is the fact that virtually no one in the United States is questioning the NSA's total surveillance of the rest of the world.

Foreign surveillance programs, unlike domestic ones, are clearly legal and constitutional, but that doesn't make them good policy. After all, most of the nearly seven billion non-Americans in the world are just as innocent as most Americans. They resent US government surveillance as much as, or perhaps more than, Americans do.

To see how foreign resentment over surveillance is hurting US interests, look at the international politics of internet governance. Unsavory regimes have long sought a preeminent role for the United Nations on internet matters. This past December in Dubai, the United States and many of its allies refused to sign a UN telecommunications treaty that would have implicated the internet in part on the grounds that it would have harmed Internet freedom. Led by Russia, some regimes want to split the internet into 193 separate "states" (pdf), managed by national governments, which interconnect according to the rules of a treaty.

These countries want such arrangements because they want to more effectively surveil and censor their own citizens. The US State Department always rightly opposed such activities, but now that leaked documents are revealing the NSA's domestic and global surveillance programs, the United States looks hypocritical.

One can come up with all kinds of excuses for why US surveillance is not hypocrisy. For example, one might argue that US policies are more benevolent than those of many other regimes, which is true. And one might recognize that in several cases, some branches of government don't know what other branches are doing – also true – and therefore US policy is not so much hypocritical as it is inadvertently contradictory. Fine. But the fact is that the NSA is galvanizing opposition to America's internet freedom agenda.

The scandal is reinvigorating Russian proposals for the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency, to take over internet technical standards and management of the domain name system. Brazil insists that the role of governments and intergovernmental agencies in managing the internet be discussed at ITU meetings in November and March. These are not major policy changes, but they now find a more sympathetic ear from the developing countries that make up the majority at the ITU, which conducts business on the basis of one vote per country.

In truth, most developing countries don't care very much about the management of the internet per se. What they really want is more access to the internet – more foreign investment and more aid to set up internet exchange points. In the past, the United States always offered more development resources as a way to smooth over its hard-line stance on preserving existing Internet institutions.

But now, developing countries don't want US assistance because they assume the equipment comes with a backdoor for the NSA. They are walking straight into the arms of Russia, China, and the ITU, and when the time comes to decide how the internet should be managed, who do you think they'll side with?

This is not to suggest that the United States shut down all of its intelligence operations. After all, other countries spy, and spying – for better or worse – is part of international politics. But the United States is one of very few countries with the capability to monitor absolutely everything that is going on in the world. This means that the kind of indiscriminate, total surveillance that the United States is presently engaged in is not strictly necessary, and unilateral disarmament is an option.

No doubt the intelligence establishment will dismiss the suggestion out of hand. US intelligence hegemony has its advantages, particularly if you are a US intelligence officer. Yet as the politics of internet governance shows, it also has significant costs. By surveilling harmless and innocent foreigners alongside America's enemies, the United States is alienating the world and projecting an arrogant disregard for the perfectly ordinary aspirations of billions of people to maintain some semblance of privacy in their personal lives. Eventually, that alienation could destroy the free, global Internet that we all love. Is it worth it?