> There is a principle of sovereignty here. You may not like the actions of your own country's intelligence agencies, but at least they are in principle subject to your own legal system and your own government can therefore hold them to account.

That's the theory. The government of my country just passed a bill legalizing the snooping practices - apparently practiced in complete illegality for years - of the intelligence services. How is that for accountable?

> Of course we could debate the practical reality vs. the theory here, but exporting data to somewhere without the same culture and formal legal safeguards of privacy that Europe has no protection or accountability even in theory.

I think it's tremendously important to take reality into account. The same Angela Merkel complaining about her phones being hacked is perfectly happy to collaborate with the NSA, and is so concerned about the privacy of EU citizens that she would ship Snowden to the US without thinking twice.

I totally agree that the practical reality matters.

However, even if our supposedly democratic and representative governments in the West are far from perfect, that isn't a good argument for unnecessarily supporting other measures that are even further from perfect as well.

It took too long to bring down the last Labour government in the UK after its succession of abuses and war-mongering, with their third term in particular a freak result of our awful electoral system, but we did kick them out eventually. And while the current coalition can now fairly be judged on its track record as we come up to our general election and its record has also been far from perfect, the influence of the minority partner (the Liberal Democrats, who had not been in government here for generations prior to 2010) is probably more clearly evident in their efforts to defend civil liberties than anywhere else.

That same Lib Dem party has been almost unbelievably naive politically since entering the government and has been so comprehensively outplayed by its coalition partner that the Lib Dems are likely to be all but wiped out at the coming election. However, the fact that the party most likely to replace them as the protest vote of choice is heavily against foreign interference in UK business and seems to have become very popular almost immediately despite most people knowing little or nothing about either the party leadership beyond one key figurehead or the party's other policies might tell us something about popular sentiment and the desire of the UK electorate not to be taken for granted by the two big (and both heavily authoritarian) parties.