America has rule of law and the NSA had to go rogue to do what it did; once their program was outed it's on all news, everyone is discussing; Americans enjoy real rights.

If China or Russia had the same capabilities there would not be any theoretical backlash against this being discovered, since par for the course there is far less freedom. It's not the abstraction that's promised even theoretically.

This is the same reason why it's better when Google (with its nominal "do no evil" strategy) turned out to collect wifi data with its street cars, which is not as bad as if Microsoft (with no such policy or mission) had done the same thing.