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The latest data, released on Tuesday, focuses on the first half of 2011.

The statistics show that the United States continues to lead the world in snooping on Google users. US law enforcement made 5,950 separate requests for user data from 11,057 user accounts. Google complied with the requests 93 percent of the time. This was an almost 40 percent increase in the number of requests compared to the same period a year earlier. On a per capita basis, France (1,300 requests) and the United Kingdom (1,273 requests) were on par with the United States. Other nations were far behind.

Brazil and Germany were the leading nations for takedowns. Thanks in part to the popularity of Orkut in Brazil, Google fielded 224 requests to remove 689 items from Google services in Brazil. Germany received 125 requests to remove 2,405 items—1,585 of which were related to allegedly defamatory search results.

It’s important to reiterate a point made to us by Chris Soghoian when we covered Google’s previous data release: while Google’s release of data is laudable, it lets us see only a small fraction of government surveillance activities. Most Google competitors do not disclose comparable statistics.

Moreover, major telecommunication firms such as AT&T and Verizon have kept surveillance statistics close to their vests, and Soghoian says that those firms field tens of thousands of requests per year. And as Ryan Singel points out, even Google’s own statistics are incomplete. Singel says they exclude national security letters and requests authorized by the secret FISA court—requests that often come with gag orders preventing public disclosure of their existence.

More:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/google-takedowns-around-the-world-lese-majeste-yes-police-brutality-no.ars