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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.'"
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."
Germany is one of the hotspots for Boundless Informant. It appears that the US spies on Germany as much as it does on China.
The NSA will probably next be cornering the market on high GPU count graphics cards.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
German companies now rate U.S. as the second worst risk to industrial espionage, only second to China. Even Russia is considered a more trustworthy IT partner than the Americans. It's not only the private citizens who care for some privacy.
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 makes somewhat less sense given that the US spies on Germany with considerable assistance from the German BND...
I can understand why Germans would Not want their emails passing through American control; but it looks like they'll have to clean house if they want to be able to do that just by going domestic.
Notice that they bitch about PRISM... but don't bother mentioning the UK's program, or any of the other monitoring programs run by various governments around the world. The US is hardly the only country doing it, but it's popular to bash on America and it draws attention away from their own spy programs. The purpose of "in-housing" the email is so it's easier for their own agencies to access.
Nvidia supercomputing clusters aren't "repurposed" for highly parallel tasks. That's what they're designed for. They don't just produce graphics cards.
And where is the evidence of the NSA actually engaging in industrial espionage?
This goes all the way back to the Seattle Asian Pacific Economic Forum in the 1990s, and Snowden released multiple documents relating that the NSA is using its capabilities engage in industrial espionage on behalf of some select companies.
Last year the federal government allowed intelligence operatives to sell the services to private companies while under the employ of these services.
Wikileaks cablegate also relates a lot of these sorts of incidents.
So, there's reams of evidence. If you can't see it that's a personal problem.
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
My point is that SSL encrypts in transit not at rest. While sniffing the traffic and breaking the SSL is likely hard, if done right and new breaks notwithstanding, but when the code lands on the mail server it won't be STORED encrypted. At that point one need only break into the server and dump the data unencrypted back to the mothership. SSL will have done nothing but made it harder to sniff the traffic. She seems to allow for the idea they may and could break in and seems to think the SSL provides some protection against this - I'm baffled.
This woman said "... 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." and she was referring to their plan to use SSL transport encryption.
Her comment makes NO sense and this is what I was trying to point out, I didn't think I'd have to explain it to this level. She seems to think that because they've used SSL in transport that someone breaking into the server is going to be faced with a crypto problem because of it - they won't. If that's truly what she thought and she was quoted accurately then I'm shocked that she claims any sort of knowledge about cryptography. Transport crypto does nothing at all for STORAGE. If all a bank ever did was rely on SSL then someone breaking into their website would have a field day with the unencrypted access to the data!
P.S. What web mail based email service DOESN'T use SSL transport? If they were allowing their customer's email to go over the wire unencrypted prior to this then I'm, again, in shock!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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.
Just wait 1-2 weeks. The next batch of revelations is due to start in about a week.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/us-usa-security-snowden-brazil-idUSBRE97600L20130807
The documents concerning this are expected to be included in them.
“The pretext [given by Washington] for the spying is only one thing: terrorism and the need to protect the [American] people. But the reality is that there are many documents which have nothing to do with terrorism or national security, but have to do with competition with other countries, in the business, industrial and economic fields," Greenwald said on Tuesday.
Source: http://rt.com/news/journalist-thousands-snowden-documents-143/
So, no concrete evidence yet; but it is coming soon.