> So in your eyes, "probably better than China" is the optimum?

Being "better", whatever that means, would still be at the bottom. It'd be difficult to do worse, assuming the Xinjiang / HK stuff.

If USA government employees are more accountable than China government employees, China wins!

I doubt US Department of Agriculture or Department of Education operate abroad or have human rights issues to FOIA, you can try.

> If USA government employees are more accountable than China government employees, China wins!

"Transparency and accountability in foreign policy/information gathering only applies to the country with a FOIA system conveniently available and uses english!"

ITT we're complaining about "overclassification" and other sins of USA's unsupervised services. (I hadn't been familiar with the atrocities in Indonesia linked by TFA...) We're not sure what you're on about. Do you mean that China and other nations have not respected human rights? We all agree. What else do you intend to say? Do you really think that "US journalists evangelize Snowden and Assange"? If that were the case, surely a name-brand media firm like WaPo, NYT, MSNBC, FoxNews, CNN, etc. would have published such evangelizing in the last several years, but they haven't. Some smaller firms do mention them, but I note that TFA doesn't. Why have you introduced this red herring?