I don't fully agree with you about the political influences, at least not in Europe. Most of the high constitutional courts tends to side with privacy and prote

I don't fully agree with you about the political influences, at least not in Europe. Most of the high constitutional courts tends to side with privacy and protection of it and of the citizens most of the time (at least in several cases I've seen in Spain, France, Netherlands and Germany). The big issue is that nowadays our government are much better at hiding how much spying they do; most of the crazy abuses are never ever challenged in court because nobody ever bother or notice. Especially with the relatively good European laws on the matter, most of stuff like this would lose in court but it never gets to that point because 1 - a lot of people don't want to spend the time and effort to push it to that point, 2 - with modern spying being so well hidden, people don't even notice their rights are being abused, so what would they sue for.