Indeed! I think the only reason Britain or France still don't have the same mass-surveillance systems in place is their lack of budgets. Otherwise I'm sure we wouldn't be better protected than the americans in the US. Although, the irony being that certainly the US knows more on us (europeans) than our own countries.
We lack the budget because that's the government we voted for. And the reason we don't spend a third of our budget on defense is not because we can't but because we don't want to.
I'm glad we don't have a mass-surveillance system and I would like to keep it that way. I don't get this attitude of "we're no better so who cares". What the US government does in the US is their business and what ours does here is our business, but when a foreign government starts spying on me that pisses me off. I wonder what your reaction would be if it was China reading your emails.
And the difficulty in spending this much comes in two ways:
a) The more important your hammer becomes, the more everything looks like a nail. The US has frequently undertaken a military response for areas where other countries might use diplomacy.
b) The military, plus contractors, plus jobs that depend on the military, plus PR and lobbying firms, all tend to distort politics in favour of increasing military importance.
Don't get me wrong: the UK and EU in general owes a lot to US military power over the years and should thank the US for a lot of our freedoms. But there is a flip side, and I think it should be recognised that such a large amount of spending does distort things.
Also the phenomenal incompetency of our (British) gubbermint when it comes to buying any item of IT more elaborate than ordering an iPod from Amazon. One of the greatest defences we have against the encroachment of the state in the UK is the amiable ineptness of it at every stage.
The US secret services are also convenient scapegoats, our own government agencies can simply ask them for information on EU citizens that would be illegal to collect in the EU and they probably do so frequently.
