The issue with your comment is that it's absurd. You are complaining about US overreach, so presumably your basis for judgement should be the situation in the U

The issue with your comment is that it's absurd. You are complaining about US overreach, so presumably your basis for judgement should be the situation in the UK. Does the UK do mass-surveillance of it's own and foreign citizens, on UK soil and outside ? Yes [1] Strong encryption of private communications is NOT legal in the UK. You have to give the police access when they request it and you cannot use the rights you have in the US to avoid giving this access [2]. (unless you consider strong encryption stuff where you have to make all keys available to the police, border guard, gchq, foreign intelligence services, and others still strong encryption. I don't) The other huge difference is that the UK refuses to be accountable for their mass surveillance afterwards. In the US a big demand is that there is a paper trail for spying, to the person being spied upon. Granted, this may be buried in something like a phone contract for mass-targeting. When they target you specifically, however, you will be notified (afterwards, if the judge so decides, but can even be beforehand), and failure to do this makes the spying illegal. Furthermore, this gives private individuals and companies the option to sue to have the police/FBI/NSA/DEA/... explain themselves (and more generally the US state). In the UK however: 1) No notification is given to the person being spied upon. The state just does it. 2) There is no recourse. If you were spied upon because a police officer wanted to be your boyfriend and needed to know where your actual boyfried was to beat him up, that's legal. [3] (yes, I realize these guys got fired, however, their actions were ruled legal) 3) If anyone in the UK takes the side of the person being spied upon, whether an internet provider, an application provider (ie. outlook.com/fb/gmail/...), they will be vigorously pursued and punished for that. This is highly illegal. 4) The UK has cooperation treaties (ie. EU treaties, and others) that let police officers in ~70 countries spy on British citizens (I heard that these treaties were used to install a phone tap, yes really, on Angela Merkel's phone. Yes, that Angela Merkel. The utter incompetence is baffling in it's scope. And yes, the guy (an officer) did this as a joke and got fired for it) So to say I don't understand your criticism here massively understates the situation ... Obviously, as a UK citizen you've got some more local problems to sort out before you criticize the US. In reality, the UK/EU is pushing these news articles and blowing up cooperation for EXACTLY the opposite reason : they don't want increased privacy for people, they want to further reduce it. They want the US to honor spying requests without respecting US law. They don't want Facebook to ask "can you explain why this is really necessary" when a police officer is asking for the exact location of EU citizens. They don't want to give reasons, and they certainly don't want the person to be told afterwards (and potentially sue them). They want full FB and instagram chat logs in every divorce case. They want ever single email a person ever sent in every commercial dispute. They want every police force and secret service in Europe to have access to every Europeans every mail, immediately, with zero oversight or tracking, and especially without any paper trail available to their victims. THAT's what Europe is fighting for. THAT's what they're calling "US surveillance overreach". Well, that, and the fact that the US successfully recorded some rather high level conversations between Merkel and Macron and managed to get caught doing it. In other words, they're incompetent, and angry. And of course, that's the US's fault (despite, of course, that Germany was also caught attempting to bug Obama, and caught having successfully bugged several high level officials before getting caught). And of course, they're angry for Trump getting elected (if you don't believe me, watch this [4], and listen to the questions). That's why there is this campaign of "the US is horrible on privacy". There is "no cooperation". But, sadly, the US is the champion of privacy in this particular fight. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/traveler-who-refused-to-give-device-passwords-to-police-found-guilty-of-obstruction-in-uk-court/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/traveler-who-refused-to-gi... [3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371833/20-police-officers-dismissed-using-force-spy-neighbours-partners.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1371833/20-police-of... [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y70LrlzrkNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y70LrlzrkNk