On what basis do you declare that 5950 requests from the United States is excessive? That works out to 1 request for every 51509 people in the US. Western Europe (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) isnt that far off, at 1 request for every 57472 people. (See
http://www.google.com/publicdata for the 2010 population numbers.) These are also the countries with the biggest terrorism bulls eyes painted on them.
There are a myriad of reasons why data can be requests besides terrorism: criminal, child porn, cyber bullying, to name a few, and there are several levels of government: federal, state, county, local, all of which can issue requests. Lastly, private citizens, that's you and me, can also subpoena such information. These would also presumably be included in the request totals.
Something that never seems to come up in these discussions/rants: the government isnt psychic. If a law enforcement agency, or an intelligence agency for that matter, gets a tip or a lead, it's obligated to follow it up. Sometimes it turns out to be real, sometimes it doesnt, but this isnt known until after the follow-up happens. Frankly, I'd rather the FBI read my email to find out I hadn't actually plotted anything than to have an airliner blown up because they didn't read the email of someone who was.
