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Deutsche Telekom Moves Email Traffic In-Country In Wake of PRISM

Posted by timothy on from the anonymity-is-for-crazy-paranoid-people dept.

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.'"

7 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. This makes sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Germany is one of the hotspots for Boundless Informant. It appears that the US spies on Germany as much as it does on China.

    1. Re:This makes sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:This makes sense by Fjandr · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Nvidia supercomputing clusters aren't "repurposed" for highly parallel tasks. That's what they're designed for. They don't just produce graphics cards.

  2. Re:so.... by chilvence · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I find it a beautiful irony that the country that invented the gestapo and the stasi finds the nsa a little bit too much :)

  3. Re:Pointless by hydrofix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:so.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Dear Everyone Else

    We like Canada more than America too

    Sincerely

    Americans

  5. why bother when you already have the keys? by SuperBanana · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.