Google has released it's transparency figures for the period January to June 2012 which details requests made by various countries to access user data held by Google. The figures provided by Google only give the total number of requests which (I think) can be a little misleading, I'm no statistician but I thought it might be informative to have a look at the figures relative to population. Other interesting comparisons might relate to law enforcement budget or be somewhat more subjective such as the goverment's stance on data retention.

Australia ranks second behind the US for requests that were complied with when accounting for population, fourth for total requests when accounting for population and ninth for total number of requests.

I think one interesting aspect of the graph below is the discrepancy in certain cases between the number of requests made and the number complied with.