it is so ironic that this whole debate seems to be limited to the protection of people who happens to have US citizenship, and not for the protection of people, period.

the main argument - "'collection of a wide array of data on innocent Americans has led to serious questions about how government will use â" or misuse â" such information" presumes that it is OK to spy on all the others.

but why?

I am Ukrainian and live in France; I've never set my feet on American soil, and am not involved in any kind of terrorist activity. Still, my phone conversations are intercepted by ECHELON, my e-mail - by Prism and alike, all the data google, microsoft and other US companies have on me, is also available for US government to access, to collect and to store without any limitation at all.

And even the most active privacy activists in the US seem to only be bothered by innocent Americans, and not innocent all...

*sigh*

Looks like there will be a new iPhone application in app store soon...

"that is not how it works in germany or any EU country I know about, like france, italy or UK or netherlands."

I would like to make two objections to your statement.

1. German legal system is quite different from those of other European countries in that it puts a very special emphasis on human rights and very strong limitations to the power of government. Most of these limitations were invented to secure the "never again" principle, referring to the specific role Germany was playing during the Second World War. To the best of my knowledge, no other country in the E.U. has any comparable set of regulations. By the way, this German particularity gave rise to many cases in which German regulations (more respective of human rights) were in conflict with European regulations (less respective) and were consequently invalidated by the CJEU for the sake of "uniform treatment" (see Eugen Schmidberger Internationale Transporte und Planzüge, C-112/00, for an example).

Anyway, my point is that you can not possibly compare limitations on government action existing in Germany with those existing in any other country of European Union (and, for that same reason, to countries signatories of ECHR).

2. I know no sound man who can pretend to *know* four legal systems (in your case, .de, .fr, .it & .nl).

3. Sticking to an example which is familiar to me (I am a practicing French attorney), I have to say that, whatever French regulations are in this matter (e-mail eavesdropping), I don't doubt any second that they are infringed on a regular basis by French authorities. This is a mere generalization of phone eavesdropping examples. Just google "écoutes téléphoniques france" and you will be surprised to find out how often phone eavesdropping scandals occur in this country and involving most prominent politicians. The last one I can remember of took place in october 2010 (you can use google translation services on this article http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2010/10/01/918282-Affaire-Woerth-Bettencourt-Les-ecoutes-telephoniques-du-Monde-etaient-illegales.html );

4. forgive me if I am mistaken, but your forum signature looks very much like an advertisement, and this seems a little bit inappropriate to me.

I'm not sure it's a good thing to do, at least if you want to use any of this data, including the burglar's IP number, in a Court. The whole idea of computer forensics is to take no action that might change data held on the analyzed computer. second, I would suggest you sending two evidence preservation letters (google the terms to get some examples), one to gmail and one to fuse.net. you don't have to prove them there's a pending litigation - just make it clear you have a firm intent to initiate one. third, find yourself a lawyer. as a (non-US) lawyer, I am absolutely sure there are some ways to oblige local police of fbi or whatever, to act - you just have to know how. if money are an issue, try the nearest law school, or maybe some non-profit organizations available locally to help victims of crimes or something. sorry for my English.

it has been so for at least three last years.

right now (gmt 06:15) their site is down it was obviously hacked by some ff user that makes their statement quite true :)