Indeed, the idea that routing your connections through other countries will help you is beyond naive. Nearly every industrialized country, including EU member nations, is documented conducting surveillance on comparable scales, and most of them (including Portugal) work closely with the NSA. Schemes like this, especially when government-sponsored, need to be looked at a lot more skeptically. They aren't doing it for privacy-conscious reasons.

As Der Spiegel put it, the BND spies on everyone but Germans, shares that data with the other collaborating countries, and then gets data on Germans in return. (And the Germans didn't call France the "evil empire" of industrial espionage for no reason.)

Indeed it would be naive to think it. It's a matter of power and control , there are no borders, no countries, no flags , only two parties , the ones who have power and the ones who don't.