Domink, I agree with everything you say. I am complaining about my country first as well. We should all worry about cleaning up our own act before we complain about others. My reference to those other places was only to demonstrate to my fellow country men what happens when government agencies get out of control.
For clarification, I still do believe we have a democracy in the US though, even though the amount of spying done by the NSA is bigger than what the Stasi was doing. Sure, it's not perfect. But this is a different story. Let's start cleaning up before that small step has a chance of getting made and things become a lot less perfect...
Ernst, unfortunately, my knowledge of UK politics is insufficient to comment.