The UK is one of the most problematic nation states on the planet. Couple all the nasty spying with all the banking, money laundering and tax havens and it's hard to think of one country doing more to suppress working people world-wide.
I'm French so of course I would tend to agree about UK (;-) but if I start to look at my country there are a lot of things not to be proud of ... and if I look at the neighbors it's the same, even Switzerland helped South Africa back in the apartheid days on a project to gas their ghettos !
Maybe Iceland ?
If anyone thinks that France, Germany and others aren't doing the exact same stuff, then they're very mistaken.
The UK is so bad that the NSA has more rights in the UK then in the US.
The UK's surveillance program was even ruled illegal once it was found out what they were doing. So what if a lot of the German public are against surveillance - so are a lot of Brits - they just don't know what their government is doing in secret.
I'd bet everything I own the French and Germans and every other major country are doing the exact same stuff.
Germany is somewhat different because of its history. We know quite a bit about what the BND does, in terms of monitoring extremist groups. We have pirates in pretty important positions and the CCC is regularly working with government in oversight commissions.
It is pretty hard to hide all that you are doing, both in terms of physical infrastructure and in terms of financials. Now it may be that the BND is extremely clever and hiding all of this from basically everybody. However given the competence displayed by the BND on various action that they have taken, it is a really hard sell that they are operating a infrastructure close to the US or UK one.
My point is that a lot of the outrage is only because the UK and US are the only ones we know of.
Countries spy for most of them it would irresponsible not to do so because riding on the high horse doesn't have much rewards on its own.
What! Please provide a source on that.
I found some links in French stating that Switzerland launched an investigation in 2002 about this.
So good sir, you are absolutely mistaken.
As a post script, Apartheid was bad but it was not much more than legalized discrimination. Let's not demonize Apartheid any more than for what it really was. And the current situation in South Africa is far worse than the situation ever was during the reign of Apartheid.