Experts surveyed in the 2014 Web Index1 concluded that 84% of the 86 countries covered lacked even moderately effective oversight and accountability mechanisms to protect Internet users from indiscriminate surveillance. A finding as worrying as this needs to be tested, so we carried out a deeper comparative analysis of a smaller sample of countries: Kenya, DR Congo, South Africa, Colombia, Germany, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, France, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.