France/US: is there any difference in the way Big Brother is spying you?

1/ recently french law makers voted a bill which allows spying on the internet... This was done without any objection.
2/ E Snowden demonstrated that NSA spied american people and perhaps illegally.
So Big Brother is on the rise with Dems in US and Socialists in France.
One can imagine if those events occurred during the Bush era or under the presidency of Sarkozy what would have been the turmoil.
But nevertheless there is a difference.
In US judges are not all lax or bowed to the government and some of them try to undertake to submit Big Brother to the law.


"The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979," the judge wrote, adding that such bulk data collection and analysis "almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation of privacy." 

Did NSA overpass its mission?

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304403804579262483158344924?mod=djem10point 


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/opinion/a-powerful-rebuke-of-mass-surveillance.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131217

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/us/politics/federal-judge-rules-against-nsa-phone-data-program.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131217&_r=0