Funny, because the perception in France (full disclosure: I'm french) - regardless of any anti-american feelings - is that the US do spy a lot, with lots of intelligence agencies having focused even more on
economic intelligence since the end of the cold war era, forcing us to defend with what we can. (
Echelon, for one, is not here to contradict this point of view.)
As much as your quoted article reports mostly on US "defeats", most of the time here we're fed with stories of how we lost (insert obligatory cheese-eating surrending monkeys joke) in this field.
Anyway, I think spying on your foes
and friends is as old as humanity, with every party saying "you did it first, I'm only defending" !