At least the Norwegians (and other Scandinavian countries) are publicly open about what they are doing. You'd probably never see this 'news story' in the UK or US except as the solution to some event that supposedly justified it
Meh, we have had the same thing as you guys for a long time. FRA (the signal intelligence in sweden) has been recording our border-passing communications for many years. This is maybe not new knowledge, but definitely not that widespread.
The information gathered (oh, they have access to XKeyscore) is then shared within X eyes (nine? fourteen?) program. The extent of FRA's intelligence operations was not known before snowden.
Some of it became more public knowledge in 2008 when there was a new law that gave them permission to do cable interception. It was later confirmed that they had been doing cable interception before the law was enacted, in conflict with the law, but "with acceptance" of the administration.
Sweden is really not much better than other countries. Norway is following suit, but with a slightly "better" law that at least requires secret court orders to store other things than metadata of things passing the border.
Edit: oh, and they are allowed (or at least not strictly disallowed) to do targeted hacking, which they have done in cooperation with other (NSA) intelligence agencies.
But, at least we do not have a secret bugdet like other democracies :) . They got about 1 billion SEK last year, or about 0.1% of the national budget.
There is so much information available in democracies if you have the time to work through it, that they are effectively protected just by the sheer amount of documentation an interested observer has to plough through.
Start with the annual budgets - they´re extremely informative as to what the real issues are.
