> The US government has a policy that is substantially similar in many respect Not at all. The US legal tools that let the government demand data substantially

> The US government has a policy that is substantially similar in many respect Not at all. The US legal tools that let the government demand data substantially limit what can be demanded. There is currently nothing in US law that prevents you from protecting your own systems. You might get a NSL, but you can fight it. No doubt the US government collects a lot of data covertly, but you can fight that too. I'm not a big fan of giant US tech companies, but (based on well-placed friends I trust) I believe Google and others sincerely fight covert collection, and they're pretty competent. I think a good choice for a private conversation would be a browser peer-to-peer WebRTC conversation on one of many hosts such as https://talky.io/ https://talky.io/ (for example). Good end-to-end encryption, perfect forward secrecy, open-source clients running on your platform of choice, many possible Web hosts which are unlikely to have been all backdoored by the government (and you can set up your own easily if you want). Obviously if you have been specifically targeted by a state-level agency, your client is probably already hacked and none of that matters, but those attacks are expensive and it seems unlikely that covers more than a small fraction of people. It is counterproductive to take the position that all countries are similarly bad and there's nothing we can do about it.