China, HK & United Arab Emirates in the past 2 years, ya gotta believe that some govts are very interested in what travels over the Internet :-)

While was in HK in 2002 there was a press article in SCMP about how Sun & Oracle had secured a large multi million dollar contract to supply the Chinese govt with web filtering software to be used for security purposes by govt security agencies. It was no secret.

The article talked about how these companies were leaders in the field & had been supplying US govt agencies with similar technology.

In the current world environment, if US security agencies weren't doing Internet monitoring & doing so particularly at peak crisis times, such as the past week, I would be complaining to the govt about lack of protection from people out to do harm.

Anyway, the up side of any belief that security agencies are snooping is that
they are best placed to mop up any problems, preferably before they happen.

Cheers

Doug M