Why does Google give US law enforcement special access to user info compared to other nations?

In the wake of the David Petraeus scandal, in which the FBI gained back-end access to the gmail accounts of the CIA director's paramour, I ran across Google's semi-annual transparency statement, in which we learn that in the first six months of 2012, Google granted all or part of 90% of information requests from US law enforcement agencies, handing out information on 16,281 users in response to 7,969 requests.

Comparing requests by country (Google provides only top-line national data, so we can't see how many were in Texas v. California, etc.), the United States was far and away the source of the most law enforcement requests to Google for information and, even more interesting, far and away had the smallest proportion of requests denied. Google responded with user account information to 90% of US law enforcement requests in the first half of 2012, which was actually down from the previous reporting periods. According to the transparency report, "We review each request to make sure that it complies with both the spirit and the letter of the law, and we may refuse to produce information or try to narrow the request in some cases." Fair enough.

Here's what I don't understand. Take a look at the approval rates for various governments that requested user account information from Google:

• United States: 90%
• Japan: 86%
• Brazil: 76%
• Switzerland: 68%
• United Kingdom: 64%
• India: 64%
• Australia: 64%
• Taiwan: 63%
• Israel: 60%
• Spain: 52%
• France: 42%
• Germany: 39% 
• Italy: 34% 
• South Korea: 35%
• Canada: 24%
• Russia: 0%
• Turkey: 0%

How is it that Google turns down German law enforcement 61% of the time, turns down Canadians 76% of the time, but American law enforcement's requests are approved at a 90% clip? Why does Google grant such a greater proportion of law enforcement requests in the United States compared to other countries, including other western democracies? Is it that US laws are more favorable to law enforcement and less conducive to personal privacy? Or does Google give US government agencies special treatment compared to other national governments? (To be fair, the rate at which Google approved US law enforcement requests has declined slightly from 94% in the second half of 2010.) Are there certain agencies responsible for the lions's share of requests or is it spread out? Do requests mostly come from federal agencies or from state and local entities? Regrettably, Google's transparency report answers none of these questions

Not only is the rate of law enforcement requests granted by Google especially high in the United States,  US agencies ask for information far more frequently than in any other country, and the number of requests is growing dramatically. Here's a chart Grits compiled from Google transparency reports:

So requests more than doubled in the last two years with little sign of the trend relenting. On one hand, if Google is going to approve such requests at a 90+% clip, I certainly understand why law enforcement agencies in the United States would  ask for the data more frequently. OTOH, that begs the question, why doesn't Google resist such requests as often in America as they do throughout the rest of the world? Does their relative leniency toward US law enforcement encourage the volume of requests, or vice versa? Is it US law or Google's relative level of sycophancy that explains the difference?

The flip side of that debate, of course, is that Google provides more transparency on these questions than companies like Facebook or US cell phone providers, so one hesitates to criticize them too harshly simply because they divulge (a little) more information than other tech companies who share user information with law enforcement. But with the government accessing Google user account information at such a rapidly increasing pace, Google cannot escape accountability for their own role in the erosion of online privacy, and the Petraeus scandal has momentarily brought that role to the forefront.

Grits continues to ponder the implications of these events and so do many others. See these items related to the implications for online privacy from the Petraeus scandal.

• EFF: When will our email betray us? An email privacy primer in light of the Petraeus scandal
• ACLU: Surveillance and security lessons from the Petraeus scandal
• Reuters: Collateral damage of our surveillance state
• The Week: What the heck, FBI?
• Glenn Greenwald: FBI's abuse of surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation
• Wired: All three branches agree: Big Brother is the new normal

The sad truth is - as one expert, who compared the scope of Google's private surveillance apparatus to "Skynet," recently informed a conference of hackers - personal privacy is all but dead for most Americans. But is Google facilitating that trend on behalf of law enforcement more rapidly in the United States than elsewhere across the globe? If they fought requests for Americans' user information harder, would police seek it out less frequently? ¿Quien sabe?

Perhaps in answering these sorts of questions we can eventually discover the real lessons of the Petraeus scandal beyond the partisan carping and short-term political positioning that's so far mostly dominated the national conversation surrounding the spymaster's fall from grace.