At the scale the US is doing it? Absolutely.
Tell me what "other major world covert agency" has these:
- Gigantic data centres like the one in Utah
- Practically all Internet data flowing through their territories
- The large majority of all cloud storage user's data, and largest social network, in the world, with the added unchecked ability for this major covert agency to request query all this data
- Strong influence in the world's crypto-standards
- Control over the world's two largest closed-source Operating Systems and the proven ability to place backdoors therein (the latter only for Windows, dunno if they got iOS too, but why wouldn't they)
There's quite a few more areas in which the US definitely has an exclusive and unique ability to track and intercept the entire world's Internet data that other "major world covert agencies" most definitely do not possess.
Now put some names to it, the others are? China and Russia? I think it was pretty bloody obvious that nobody was suggesting to all start using cloud storage in those territories instead. But even then, it IS strictly better to have your data surveilled in part by China, Russia and the US, than to have all of it surveilled by a single entity, the US. Because you know it won't be shared between them, and that is a tiny bit of privacy gained. So that's already where your silly defence of your beloved Orwellian government falls apart.
Of course, there's other places still.
Take the Netherlands, definitely another bad choice, but at least none of these "major covert agencies" have a direct line into our data. Our own secret service (AIVD) can be rather cosy with the NSA, and they definitely perform surveillance on a level of intrusiveness that equals and exceeds that of the NSA, but not on a level of SCALE and that is, when it comes to data and privacy, what can make all the difference. When the NSA comes knocking on the door of a Dutch Internet hosting provider (this happened), they will refuse or tell them to contact the police or something. We have no "gag orders", "secret laws", "plea bargaining" or similar Kafkaesque nightmare fuel like the US, so if the police forces a company to hand over data to the US without an extremely good reason, heads will roll. Like everywhere, there is a lack of accountability in NL, but this much I trust. You guys wouldn't need gag orders if no one would give a shit, after all.
So, a tiny but heavily surveilled country like NL is already two steps better for hosting data than the US. And then there's even better places. I don't know, I've heard people mention Switzerland? What about some places in East Europe with not too much oversight? Either way, just fragmenting all that data instead of keeping all of it right in the hole of the beast, is going to make it a lot harder to develop a terribly powerful singular system such as XKeyScore.
Then, there's of course the tiny little slight caused by the fact that hardly anyone in the US gave a damn about the whole world's Internet data being intercepted and analyzed by the NSA, but only started to complain when it turned out that included them, too. Not just that, but even right here on HN some people have the audacity to argue that it's fine (expected, even) to do this to the world, as long as there are legal checks and rules before the same is applied to US citizens. Doesn't sit very well with me, that. Is already a great reason to grab my data and take it some place else, and tell all my friends in the world to do the same.
So just stop, stop making excuses for the US or the NSA, and start acting like a citizen of the world.
This is the Internet, this is the 21st century, just grow up beyond "but they're doing it toooooo!", and who are you?