I don't :). For what it's worth, our government very recently passed laws granting our GCSB much further reaching powers. It's been a media circus; one particularly hypocritical politician's currently up in arms because a bunch of his data was compromised -- but in a staggering display of cognitive dissonance, Mr. Dunne voted for the law anyway.

Basically, I've always accepted that whatever I do online is public anyway. That doesn't mean I endorse that, and I'd rather give my money to local companies than endorse the US at this time.

Would you rather have the American NSA with the size of their budget and capabilities, trying to get at your data, or the Estonian equivalent, with their budget and capabilities?

Well for starters which one gets to talk to the Estonian state police?

But either way surveillance is either good or it's bad, I've never understood the reasoning of people who say that it's OK for their own state to do surveillance as they're "probably inept" anyways.

Would you be OK with NSA surveillance if the NSA were inept? No, you wouldn't, so apply the same standard to your own nation as you do to the USA.

There's a much higher probability of your data being compromised by the NSA than by any other surveillance institution. Not sure why you don't understand that, not all surveillance is equally successful.

The very principle is wrong, but if we assume everyone is surveilling us (which is what is being discussed as people make excuses for the US government doing it), then you'd want to be surveilled by the ones who are the least likely to actually hurt you.

It's obvious no one is thinking their own government will never try to break laws just because they're national, but the extent to which they'll do it is far, far less than the US government. For the very practical reasons of political capital, budget, technological and intellectual capabilities.

My own country had a dictatorship until 1974.

I am old enough to have gotten the last bits of it, as we learned to move to democracy, so I would call our secret services anything but inept.

Not sure if this is the position you're asking about, but my position is that surveillance of foreigners is far less of a problem than of citizens in any state. Surveillance of local citizens can be abused to destroy democracy, whereas that of foreigners cannot be. Citizens need to be protected from their own government which holds tremendous power over them, but less so w.r.t foreign government.

>Citizens need to be protected from their own government which holds tremendous power over them, but less so w.r.t foreign government.

The US certainly holds less power over foreigners, but the CIA's job is to blur the distinction between citizens and foreigners, and the CIA operates with essentially no oversight or restrictions aside from its budget.

Nah, I'm referring to people who say that domestic surveillance from their own nation's spy agency is better than being spied on by NSA (despite their being 'foreign' to the NSA).

Although the reasoning you mention is a better way to express one of the points I was trying to make.

I would not call the Estonian Navy inept. But neither would I be worried about them getting an aircraft carrier.

But we're not comparing navies. Something like a Navy has an extraordinarily high up-front cost before you get any value at all from it.

People-focused forces (such as the police or an army) don't have the same issue.

Nor do technologies that are relatively cheap, such as the kind of computer hardware that would help a state surveil its own networks.

If anything, America is slipping compared to the rest of the world with regard to the quality of their computer programmers and other computer-focused developers. Even countries like Estonia could certainly find someone to help them develop competent surveillance if necessary.

The only limitation is that they'd probably not be able to attack the underpinnings of cryptology the way the NSA probably can, but we as computer professionals already know that usually the crypto is not the problem, it's the people or the implementation that is, and both of those are within reach of the Estonia state, if they really wish.

That's a bunch of baloney. Some people prefer freedom over surveillance and their government budget priorities actually reflect this.

You're surely heard of "non-appropriated funds"? Who says all government spending has to be tracked in a budget?

Alternatively, some countries do not fetishize surveillance and militarism, having experienced life in an empire that did.

So mere non-fetishization of militaries and surveillance is enough to prevent despots from gaining that power?

Remember we're not talking about the people foisting this on themselves, we're talking about the government taking on that power.