Can you explain more what is going on? A civ respawns and it starts with a nonzero espionage priority? Do you remember if you had set a priority for them before they had originally died?
Yep, that's exactly what's going on. Also, I don't think I ever have set a priority on them, especially not a high one. Sometimes these resurrections are Thailand or India when I'm a european civ and never encountered them (or vice versa).
Until I have a high esp output (and I usually don't increase the slider for that, just use the accumulation from buildings), I usually only put priorities of +1 on one or two civs at the same time, while the rest remain at 0. And then, I make contact with resurrected China or
Norwaysweden and they suddenly drain me with a +4 or +7 priority.
But I have never observed a regularity in this setup. I'm not even really 100% certain that it occurs only with respawns - could be also with first contacts. I didn't really track this problem and also don't have a savegame to point it out. Searching for it, I found it NOT happening in my current game in three instances of first-contact which I loaded up to check. Still, it occurs just regularly enough for me to know that it can be annoying and is still there, in the current version.
Maybe your suspicion is right and it has to do with the espionage setting that we assigned to the civ before their previous death.
Another possibility is that this is how the AI would assign espionage priorities on the newly-found civs itself; and some of the AI code has sneaked into the human player's section. I believe that the AI has its own way of assigning priority, putting +10 and +5 on the primary and secondary threats while zeroing all lesser/non-immediate threats. But while the AI would recalculate the Ctrl+E setting each turn, the human player just gets it set upon contact, and is then left to dial it back manually once they notice.
EDIT: Nevermind the attached file. Upon thinking about it, I noticed that it the Mexico switch there doesn't contribute to this problem and I re-phrased the message, but forgot to detach the file. It proves nothing.