Page 123 of the documents released in Glenn Greenwald's "No Place To Hide" lists at least 37 countries (that the United States has cyber partnerships with).
Of those 37 countries, only a minor fraction have the budget to operate the way NSA does. That leaves approximately 160 other sovereign entities. Let's say half of them are despotic and don't count. That leaves 80. Out of those I'd wager that more than half are have governments too under-resourced to have the ability to put their people in the kind of panopticon Americans live in. In other words there may be hundreds of milllions of people who are more free than Americans. Who are not fearful Hobbeseans suckling at NSA'a teat. Somehow, those people have not yet succumbed to "terrorism" of whatever the scare du jour is.
>Of those 37 countries, only a minor fraction have the budget to operate the way NSA does.
There will be differences in cost and budget for each nation. The United States has 25% of the world GDP (compared to 4%) of the population. That we can afford to fund the Lamborghini of intelligence operations isn't to discount other states that have less well funded capabilities.
You'll see plenty of parallels with traditional warfare: like that countries with smaller budgets ally themselves with countries that have more capabilities.
> Let's say half of them are despotic and don't count
Let's not. Those are some awfully large numbers for one. But more fundamentally why don't the armies and intelligence capabilities of tyrannies count?
> Out of those I'd wager that more than half are have governments too under-resourced to have the ability to put their people in the kind of panopticon Americans live
The nice thing is that surveillance, if done right, is reasonably cheap. Many other countries, especially in the ones you 'don't count' have laws preventing citizen use of any reasonable encryption whatsoever.
http://cryptome.org/2014/05/npth-docs-compare.pdf
(on page 16 of the link)