I know a lot of this post-PRISM fear of the US government is to be expected and is certainly popular on HN, but comments that single out the US like this really make little sense to me. The governments of Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all share tech-related intel with the United States and, potentially if not presumably, have similarly intrusive methods of surveillance. China goes so far as to ban social media sites that they don't have control over (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube) and replaces them with sites that they do (renren, weibo, and youku/tudou). That, combined with general censorship of the web, is far scarier than what the NSA does, even assuming the NSA's scope is as wide as television shows make it out to be. And even in most other countries, the scope of domestic Internet surveillance is unknown, which is very different from "known to be minimal".

Edit: Ah if this was about intellectual property takedowns, then currently the US situation is a bit worse than most of the rest of the world. But still, China friggin censors their Internet, and comments like the above still seem to always single out the US.