Please don't be under the impression that things are any different outside the US. In fact, if anything NSA surveillance (with the help of various allies) is even more pervasive. In particular the UK, Australian, Canadian, and NZ equivalents to the NSA are very closely tied in (effectively organisationally integrated) as part of the Echelon progam revealed/described by Nicky Hager way back in 2000 http://www.nickyhager.info/echelon-a-story-about-how-informa.... Things only escalated since 2001 of course. Similar programs exist in Germany, NATO countries and generally, around the world, this being the official and legal mission of NSA (to monitor foreign communications).
When I was interviewed for a job at the GCSB (NZ equivalent of NSA) they described how each member of the alliance, being hamstrung by the legislation that did not allow them to monitor their own citizens had formed an integrated program (he didnt use the word ECHELON) where they arranged for each ally to monitor the communications of their 'foreign' allies and then to share information. He said this in a job interview so not exactly a secret! I guess after a while the NSA felt they could no longer rely on foreign services to do a good enough job. Since the funding for NSA is so incredibly massive (larger than FBI and CIA combined) what did you think they were spending all that money on?
Perhaps one of the few places your cloud services be free of NSA monitoring would be in China. But then... ;-)
I'd assumed that moving back to NZ might be a solution, sadly that seems to not be the case. Fortunately it's a nice place to be anyway.
It seems like the only option is to live in a country that's so insignificant that no-one cares about it, and whose government is too incompetent to implement something like this :-)
I think we qualify under the last two criteria ;-) unfortunately our GCSB get's lots of help from our big brother across the lake. We actually had our own wee 'Oh noes they are spying on our local citizens' scandal the other day.. the response of which was for the government to pass legislation making it retroactively legal. Yay.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1305/S00043/gordon-campbell...
When I was interviewed for a job at the GCSB (NZ equivalent of NSA) they described how each member of the alliance, being hamstrung by the legislation that did not allow them to monitor their own citizens had formed an integrated program (he didnt use the word ECHELON) where they arranged for each ally to monitor the communications of their 'foreign' allies and then to share information. He said this in a job interview so not exactly a secret! I guess after a while the NSA felt they could no longer rely on foreign services to do a good enough job. Since the funding for NSA is so incredibly massive (larger than FBI and CIA combined) what did you think they were spending all that money on?
Perhaps one of the few places your cloud services be free of NSA monitoring would be in China. But then... ;-)