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Deutsche Telekom Moves Email Traffic In-Country In Wake of PRISM
kdryer39 writes "Germany's leading telecom provider announced on Friday that it will only use German servers to handle any email traffic over its systems, citing privacy concerns arising from the recent PRISM leak and its 'public outrage over U.S. spy programs accessing citizens' private messages.' In a related move, DT has also announced that they will be providing email services over SSL to further secure their customers' communications. Sandro Gaycken, a professor of cyber security at Berlin's Free University, said 'This will make a big difference...Of course the NSA could still break in if they wanted to, but the mass encryption of emails would make it harder and more expensive for them to do so.'"
Germany is one of the hotspots for Boundless Informant. It appears that the US spies on Germany as much as it does on China.
It has come to this
...those officials might know more than they let on? After all, this could be a simple contingency plan they've had ready.
SSL is a transport crypto, if they "break in" the data is still stored in clear text on the servers. This was a crypto professor?? Wow...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Because this message will hit the front pages and prime time news.
Although many Europeans say they've got nothing to hide they are jstill pissed off about the warrant-less spying an outside, previously considered friendly, force is doing upon them.
I am really sad about the need for this walling off, it defeats the great idea and ideal of a world-wide network.
But it seems to be necessary, if only as a message to the perpetrators because we know nothing is unbreakable.
And please do remember this mail will still be accessible to German courts but now on their own conditions.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
All governments monitor their citizens.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And the NSA announced that it will figure out a way to get DT's data anyway because that's how they roll.
Does this affect Deutsche Telekom subsidiaries such as T-Mobile USA?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
-1....
a little?
a little bit of crap still is crap.
What's stopping the NSA from man in the middling all this SSL traffic? They have the fibre providers rooted, I find it hard to believe that they don't have to print certs like the treasury prints money. I seem to recall China doing something similar with one of their root CAs a couple of years back.
and good on him for that... the goverment needs a good solid reminder that they are supposed to be working for the people, and not the corporate dogs.
This is all gearing up to be a modern form of dictatorship...
Corporate power = hitler power... over time...
"95% of intra-German Internet communications are routed via a switch in Frankfurt."
From the EU "Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System"
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN
How will SSL be "harder and more expensive" for the NSA/GCHQ if a friendly German agency just hands over the keys again?
Seems like the West German post war telco system was designed to track Soviet/East German contacts via a few central locations.
Why would the US need to "break in" if they where in on the design and have a great generational working relationship with German telcos and intelligence agency staff?
i.e. "still doesn't prevent governments from getting information"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
are the Google fanboys. 'I don't care about my privacy because they're providing really awesome service for me... before I even know I want it!'
You know what the next step from that is? Providing you really awesome service from the government before you even realize you did something wrong. Y'know, assuming you DON'T fuck up, and they just need to dig up something to blackmail you with instead. Either/or.
ATF uses fake drugs, big bucks to snare suspects
It's the drugs â" though non-existent â" that make that possible because federal law usually imposes tougher mandatory sentences for drugs than for guns. The more drugs the agents say are likely to be in the stash house, the longer the targets' sentence is likely to be. Conspiring to distribute 5 kilograms of cocaine usually carries a mandatory 10-year sentence â" or 20 years if the target has already been convicted of a drug crime.
That fact has not escaped judges' notice. The ATF's stings give agents "virtually unfettered ability to inflate the amount of drugs supposedly in the house and thereby obtain a greater sentence," a federal appeals court in California said in 2010. "The ease with which the government can manipulate these factors makes us wary." Still, most courts have said tough federal sentencing laws leave them powerless to grant shorter prison terms.
To the ATF, long sentences are the point. Fifteen years "is the mark," Smith said.
"You get the guy, you get him with a gun, and you can lock him up for 18 months for the gun. All you did was give this guy street creds," Smith said. "When you go in there and you stamp him out with a 15-to-life sentence, you make an impact in that community." ...
[A defendant's] lawyer, Michael Falconer, said he wouldn't be opposed to the drug-house stings if he thought the ATF could make sure they were aimed only at people who were already ripping off drug dealers. "But on some level," he said, "it's Orwellian that they have to create crime to prevent crime."
You know what the US government won't do for that same individual? Ensure they have a decent education, a basic level of care for their mental and physical health, a safe neighborhood, and a real shot at becoming a contributing member of society even though that would cost less than convicting them of thoughtcrime and throwing them in prison for fifteen years. Instead we pay for some kitted out machine gun-toting pigs to play cowboy rather than policing the streets like officers. Not incidentally, they're too chickenshit to get out of their cars in a lot of those neighborhoods. Yet they still collect their paycheck and their pension, live way out in the suburbs to avoid the desperation they help create with their cowardice, and pat themselves on the back for being heroes.
Now imagine you're an immigrant, or an Iraqi, Yemeni, Afghani, or Syrian. You're worth even less than a citizen. You're trash. You're not even a speedbump on the way to some policy goal rooted in geopolitical theories that have been dead to the rest of the world since the 80s. The kind of policy that sends a million troops and five trillion dollars to a sanctioned, isolated nation, and ends up destabilizing the entire region, massively aiding Iran, and stoking tensions between Shia and Sunni, all while avoiding a single hint of punishment for Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where all of the funding and most of the terrorists for 9/11 came from. Oh, and as a plus: where al Qaeda was unheard of before, they now have another weak state to operate from. Brilliant.
That's why the rest of the world despises the American government. It's not our freedom. It's our complete lack of principle, abject hypocrisy, and massive state violence that they hate. And with our apathetic political landscape, they're beginning to tire of Americans individually for being lazy, ignorant, wasteful, and greedy. We just sit here and take it; a nation of lolling toddlers waiting on the next innovation in fast food and reruns of Pawn Stars while our wealth is squandered in military adventurism that has killed millions of innocent people in only five decades.
PRISM is just icing on the rotting carcass that once wa
The metadata will still be collected as soon as the email leaves the smtp server unencrypted.
Perhaps it's time for mail clients to make a comeback.
With end-to-end encryption, such as PGP, GPG or S/MIME, users control their own security and don't have to trust anyone in between, so all the ISPs could know (and leak to whoever wants to spy on their users) is the email addresses in the routing, not the email contents. These problems were all solved many years ago. Sure, mail clients aren't as convenient as webmail, but if there's a concerted attack by our ISPs on our private communications, the least we can do is fight back.
There are secure mail clients for pretty much every OS. So no easy browser access, but that's the cost of controlling your own communications.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Next make sure that all citizens have a public IP, can put a server there, and even provide an SSL certificate and generic dns name so they can put their own secure servers if they want. Teach to trust noone, and they will be free.
The NSA will probably next be cornering the market on high GPU count graphics cards.
What makes you think they don't have the private keys already, or can't get them?
At this point it's probably not unreasonable at all to assume that the NSA either has their foot in the door somehow, or simply National Security Letter's the CA into giving them any keys they want. Technically, all they'd need is the CA's keys, as that's all that protects *your* private key when it's in transit to you, since they're already snooping for everything else.
Really, the current CA system is a dream for the NSA - encryption that is controlled completely by a small group. It's now making a lot of sense why they went after Zimmerman for PGP. The peer-to-peer trust network and person-to-person encryption must've scared the shit out of them.
While we're on the subject of reasonable assumptions - it seems reasonable to assume that the NSA has worked to insert weaknesses and vulnerabilities in most open-source encryption software. Whether they've been successful or not is what we need to know. Remember the fuss a few years ago with IPSEC, OpenBSD, and the FBI?
Please help metamoderate.
Spooks spy. That's what they do. It's their job and they're good at it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All your jobs are belong to us.
It is a crazy statement, the only thing I can think is that the journalist messed up what is actually being done... perhaps there is also encryption happening on the server in addition to SSL, though if you break into the server decrypting the messages on the fly it seems a short skip to get the content anyway... but at least they can't just copy a database file. They have to copy the database file AND a private key that was stored on the same server. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dear World,
America's Special Friends in the Commonwealth of Nations have been spying with us since day 0.
Sincerely,
The American militia
Spend lots of resources on breaking the SSL encryption? No, just sent a National Security letter to Verisign because Deutsche Telekom’s webmail uses a Verisign certificate: http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/3742/y87k.jpg
They hadn't already enabled SSL? This is a travesty. SSL should be enabled to protect against opportunistic hackers at public wi-fi networks etc. It will also protect against more advanced enemies like the mafia (the mafia would probably use trojans or hardware wiretaps, if they actually do tech stuff).
SSL isn't that great vs. big governments anyway: anyone with any valid CA cert can spoof a valid cert for any site. It does, however, mean that they can't passively tap the stream, they have to use a man in the middle attack (or possibly immense computing resources or unknown weaknesses in the algorithm).
As if the German gov't isn't snooping just like the USA? Anyone who believes they aren't should lighten up on how much of the Kool-Aid they sip.
They will. They have a unlimited budget to to so.
()-()
The present Germany includes the former Deutsche Democratic Republic (aka 'East Germany) which was one of the more totalitarian states ever devised by man. The DDR took surveillance of its citizens to extreme levels including listening to and recording all phone calls and other communications but also including the development of a nationwide network of citizens who spied on their neighbors (and each other) and reported to the East German police on every activity. The point here is that many/most German citizens are far more aware of the human cost of government surveillance than Americans and the Germans want no part of it. On the plus side, though, there was not a single instance of an attack by Islamic terrorists in the former East Germany during its painful existence.
All information gathered by the NSA in regards to German emails was given to the NSA in a mutual exchange of intelligence information. What the Germans are doing now is trying to wash their hands of any complicity in the matter, even when that very information helped capture two Russian spies. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/trial-of-russian-spies-in-germany-strains-diplomatic-relations-a-908975.html
I honestly didn't expect things to change as quickly as all that. And in actuality, I rather expected (though didn't express) the US government backpedal and cease most of the offending activity. In fact, I rather hoped the defunding of the NSA went through. It did not and I am sure that had a lot to do with the accelleration of efforts to "route around the damage."
I think it's time we either change our national anthem or change our nation. "Land of the free and home of the brave" we are neither.
And while I feel that the global financial crises are engineered and intentional, I think one thing the engineers are failing to appreciate is that when people have nothing to lose, that is when they are the biggest threat to those in power and/or in control. (French revolution anyone?) And while it seems apparent they have been planning for that eventuality by militarizing police and working to register and eventually take all the guns, things may be failing faster than they can roll these changes out.
The more people begin to mistrust US technologies, US companies and anything connected or influenced by US government, the more the rest of the world will begin to heal. Meanwhile, the US will become an extremely challenged nation... sad, but it needs to happen.
While the original article doesn't clearly point to a German article on this, I assume this is about the while DE-Mail/e-Post crap that Telekom/United Internet and German Post has set up ... the problem here is, that neither of their services provide a clean end-to-end encryption. While the communication between the providers (like German Telekom) and the end user at both ends of the email communication may be encrypted, mails are decrypted at the provider in order to "scan for viruses and malware", of course only to protect the user ... yeah, right. So, the whole system is broken by design ... Law enforcement, BND (German NSA), or whoever have nice central points where they can access information unencrypted. The only improvement over using US or other international servers is that access supposedly is under German control and therefore German laws. ... too bad that too few people are willing and able to use things like PGP/GPG to encrypt their mails ...
How much that is worth has been seen (and most likely will become more clear over the next few months) in the wake of the NSA affair
Since the NSA has hardware set up that can likely intercept any communication, yes the CA key is all that protects it because the NSA can simply generate their own key, sign it with their CA and and MITM you. They have probably been doing this for some time. That is what GP meant.