[ionised]

Nope. They're all as bad as eachother, except the UK which is by far the worst of all of them (USA included).

In the USA at least though, there is the illusion of having some form of debate over privacy and surveillance (USA Freedom Act).

In the UK and EU they aren't even pretending to have this debate. They're just steaming right on ahead with draconian and regressive policies.

[tptacek]

I have a really hard time believing that the US is categorically better than Europe on this. Could you maybe be a bit more specific?

I think I share the opinion about the UK being worse than the US on this spectrum, and could probably flesh it out if someone very familiar with UK law was here to fact-check me.

[ionised]

I was referring more to the USA Freedom Act, which in fairness does very little to reform mass surveillance (and in many cases makes it a lot worse) but the fact that this 'reform' was tabled at all is something that hasn't occurred at all in the UK and EU.

The public has largely been ignored and the government of the UK actually quietly rewrote laws relating to surveillance in order to grant immunity from prosecution to GCHQ.

They even allowed Privacy International to continue with their law suit for a whole year knowing that it wouldn't go anywhere because of the changes they had made to the law without notifying anybody.