You have it backwards, Sweden requires more data retention than USA does. http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,15826462,00.html USA has no laws at all about data retention. NSA sucks everything up but it is illegal for them to be doing so. Swedish signals intelligence agency does the same thing though, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_traffic_database. Pretty much any country with a signals intelligence agency and any significant amount of internet traffic passing through them does the same exact shit though. USA is one of the only places that doesn't currently have mandatory data retention laws. Germany had them for a short while but their high court deemed them to be illegal last I heard, and demanded all the logs that had been kept up to that point be destroyed. Data retention is mandatory for all members of the EU but some have ignored the mandate. Of course if feds want to log data they can legally force people to start logging if they can get court orders. But USA remains one of the few places where dragnet logging is not required by law.