The impresion I have is that Obama "was convinced" to go along with these programs after elected. He might have truly believed the system was not abusive, or if he didn't he would be risking creating enemies inside his government, or both.

The problem is, no matter how much non-abusive such a system might be today/yesterday, it will/would derail into abuse in the future (1 year, 5 years, 10 years time, who knows). There's no way people with this kind of power would always "be responsible".

I don't know. If not in my own home (I've thought about it, but since I moved around so many times it's not feasible), maybe Iceland?

I really don't know. Europe is farily good in privacy laws, except maybe Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA_law

Here's an example:

http://blog.workhere.io/mozilla-needs-to-move-persona-out-of.../

And as much as I love Google, I don't know how much comfortable I am in using their cloud services for everything... Unless they allow me to choose which of their datacenters my email is being stored.