Lots of people like to say that the US has a bad record of civil liberty. I think that one can say that, but it reveals an odd slant of mind or selective evaluation of the facts. I am sure that the NSA, for instance, mines data much more widely and efficiently than say the German authorities, for whom it is explicitly illegal to monitor the data. What they seem to have done, was to grant access to the American agencies to the data flow and then get the forbidden fruit information from the US. Now that Snowden published this incriminating stuff, the German reaction is to rile against the Americans, though, the illegal infringement of citizen rights was by German authorities and the Americans were only doing, what the representatives of the Germans had allowed them to do.
Something like that is a rather substantial breach of civil rights by the local government. It is not registered as such by the local population, because the finger is pointed at others. In the US this is quite different and the civil rights issue with the US government is first page material. I have often found, when checking the indexes such as those you refer to, that the positive valuation of a country rested on this type of information asymmetry and that the reality was very different.