Don't get me wrong here. I was and still am horrified at the invasion of privacy by the NSA and think of Edward Snowden as a whistle-blower, not a criminal. But these protests in New Zealand weren't inspired by him. The only thing in common is that they're protests about a country's intelligence agency...
Back in 2012 Kim Dotcom was arrested by the New Zealand police over copyright infringement stuff. The US tried to get NZ to extradite him to the US to face charges and Dotcom fought and won. But what had happened before that was that the NZ police requested that the GCSB monitor him, tap his phone etc. That was illegal, as the GCSB isn't legally allowed to do that to NZ citizens and residents. It led to questions about the New Zealand government's willingness to cooperate with the US, as well as there being an official inquiry into what the GCSB had done. The head of the agency claimed that Dotcom was the only person they'd done this to, but the official report which was released in April this year showed otherwise. The government's now introducing some changes to the GCSB bill, which I'm assuming is fall-out from the official report.
The main changes are:
1. that the country's foreign intelligence agency will be the subject of an independent review in 2015 and an automatic review every five to seven years after that. A five-year review echoes the situation in Australia. It also goes quite some way towards satisfying the call by Labour and the Greens for an independent inquiry into the country's security services, even if they wanted this to precede the passage of the legislation.
2. if a government wants to expand the domestic agencies which the GCSB will be able to help beyond the police, the Security Intelligence Service and the Defence Force, it will have to get the support of Parliament for another amendment bill, rather than Cabinet simply ticking it off via regulation. That negates the possibility of the likes of Customs, the Immigration Department or Inland Revenue using the GCSB's sophisticated cybersecurity equipment without a considered debate on the ramifications. This is important because the bill extends the bureau's objectives beyond national security to the sweeping "economic wellbeing of New Zealand".
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10903287
Change #1 is a good change. There does need to be regular independent reviews of the activities and processes of intelligence agencies. And I think #2 will make it far more difficult for a Kim Dotcom situation to happen again. I'm not sure if there's anything else buried in the changes, but I'm not seeing any Edward Snowden/NSA style stuff in there 
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