There's definitely a large spectrum, between countries where the government uses violent means to suppress political oppostion (including but not limited to Belarus), over governments that deport people who met with a "person of interest" to third-party countries where they get tortured (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar) to countries where people just feel that preemptive intelligence gathering without concrete indications is more a cover-your-ass thing than a useful technique to fight crime.

Note that Lawful Interception (i.e. interfaces for government agencies to siphon off data from internet providers), as it was established by US and Europe, was never a focused effort to provide data for criminal investigations but started out with different groups of users in mind (i.e., espionnage and possibly other uses that the average citizen would find spooky).

And, as the article explains, the same technology that is used to guarantee Lawful Interception in Germany/US/other countries is used for political suppression in countries that would perhaps lack the technical sophistication but have a budget and corresponding sources for these. (Although I'm reasonably certain that companies in China and Russia will be happy to provide similar technology to potential buyers).