I was recently in Aschaffenburg (Germany) doing interoperability tests with some of our networking equipment and a large SCADA vendor. About two hours into the tests, we ran into some problems, which we quickly identified as being related to the firewall on one of the test laptops in their lab having a very restrictive firewall rule (wouldn't allow ping). We had to wait for the better part of two hours while they got approval to adjust the firewall rules to allow ping from another device in the same lab. Note that this was a lab laptop, and these were technically sophisticated people - they understood the implication of allowing ping - it's just that their policy/procedures with regards to security were very, very strict.
I can guarantee you, in any interop tests I've done in Silicon Valley - there would be zero friction (even with the utility companies, enterprise software vendors, scada vendors) around opening up icmp on a lab laptop firewall.
I cite this as an example where Americans (at least those in Norcal) are more lax regarding security than another culture (in this case, whatever was prevalent in the part of Germany Aschaffenburg is located in)