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Deutsche Telekom Snubs US E-Mail Servers
German Firms Now Automatically Encrypt E-Mails
BERLIN, Aug 11, (Agencies): Germanys leading telecoms operator will channel email traffic exclusively through its domestic servers in response to public outrage over US spy programmes accessing citizens private messages, Deutsche Telekom said on Friday. Deutsche Telekom launched the E-mail made in Germany initiative after a month of public indignation over reports on US snooping based on documents leaked by fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The spying scandal, which has filled German newspapers for weeks, has become a major headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of a Sept 22 election. Government snooping is a sensitive subject in Germany due to the heavy surveillance of citizens in the former communist East and under Hitlers Nazis.
The spying campaign has deeply rattled Germans, Deutsche Telekom Chief Executive Rene Obermann said at a news conference in Berlin on Friday to launch the initiative aiming to make email communication in Germany more secure. Deutsche Telekom and its partner United Internet, which account for about two-thirds of all email users in Germany, said they would protect clients emails via so-called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption. This is an option already offered by Google. The former telecommunications monopoly, in which the German state remains the biggest investor with a 32 percent stake, said all data processing and storage would take place in Germany. This will make a big difference, said Sandro Gaycken, a professor of cyber security at Berlins Free University.
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, said Gaycken. German news magazine Der Spiegel reported in June, citing an NSA document, that the United States taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany in a typical month. Snooping fears will boost sales of IT security goods like virus scanners, firewalls and access administration tools, which had been expected to be worth 3.33 billion euros in Germany this year, up from 3.16 billion in 2012, according to the IT-market data provider International Data Corporation (IDC). But Bitkom, which represents more than 2,000 German IT companies, expects even higher demand after news of wholesale electronic surveillance by American and British intelligence. The reports about PRISM and Tempora have considerably raised awareness for IT security, Bitkom President Dieter Kempf said in a statement, adding that the market should now outpace the 5 percent growth that had been expected this year.
Stefan Frei, a research director at information security company NSS Labs, said the Telekom response was a step in the right direction. This initiative helps to tackle the-day-to-day sniffing around on the communication lines but it still doesnt prevent governments from getting information, Frei said.
The European Union is ranked as a key priority in a list of spying targets for the US National Security Agency, German weekly Der Spiegel said Saturday, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The classified document, dated April 2013, states that the US secret services are especially interested in gathering intelligence concerning the 28-member blocs foreign policy, international trade, and economic stability, the magazine reported.
Using a ranking system from one to five (from high to low importance), those three areas were given a number three ranking, according to the document seen by Der Spiegel. Topics related to new technology and energy security were assigned the lowest-level priority. Among individual countries, Washington reportedly listed China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea among its top surveillance targets.
Germany, France and Japan were considered of mid-level interest, the weekly added. The latest revelations appear to back up earlier NSA documents released by Snowden that claimed that Washington was snooping on EU offices in Brussels and in the States, sparking outrage among European countries, Der Spiegel said.
Snowdens leaks in recent weeks, which have revealed that the US is systematically seizing vast amounts of telephone and online data around the world, have proved a major headache for Washington and even threatened to derail a huge US-EU trade deal.
US President Barack Obama has scrambled to reassure allies and American citizens about the extent of the spying.
On Friday he pledged to overhaul US secret surveillance, promising greater oversight and transparency.
Snowden, who is wanted by the US on espionage charges, was granted temporary asylum in Russia earlier this month, a move that so angered Obama that he cancelled an upcoming high-profile meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
An encrypted email service believed to have been used by American fugitive Edward Snowden shut down abruptly on Thursday amid a legal fight that appeared to involve US government attempts to win access to customer information.
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit, Lavabit LLC owner Ladar Levison wrote in a letter that was posted on the Texas-based companys website on Thursday.
Levison said he has decided to suspend operations but was barred from discussing the events over the past six weeks that led to his decision.
That matches the period since Snowden went public as the source of media reports detailing secret electronic spying operations by the US National Security Agency.
This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States, Levison wrote. The US Department of Justice had no immediate comment. Later on Thursday, an executive with a better-known provider of secure email said his company had also shut down that service. Jon Callas, co-founder of Silent Circle Inc, said on Twitter and in a blog post that Silent Circle had ended Silent Mail. We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now, Callas wrote on a blog addressed to customers. Silent Circle, co-founded by the PGP cryptography inventor Phil Zimmermann, will continue to offer secure texting and secure phone calls, but email is harder to keep truly private, Callas wrote. He and company representatives didnt immediately respond to interview requests.
At a Moscow news conference four weeks ago, a Human Rights Watch representative said she had been contacted by Snowden from a Lavabit email address, according to news website GlobalPost.com.
Use of effective encryption by regular email users is rare. Some of Snowdens leaked documents show that Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and other large providers have been compelled to help intelligence authorities gather email and other data on their users. The big providers and other companies typically offer encryption but said they cooperate with legal requests, including those by intelligence officials. Lavabit was something of an outlier, in part because it had said email was encrypted on its servers and could only be accessed with the users password.
German Firms Now Automatically Encrypt E-Mails
BERLIN, Aug 11, (Agencies): Germanys leading telecoms operator will channel email traffic exclusively through its domestic servers in response to public outrage over US spy programmes accessing citizens private messages, Deutsche Telekom said on Friday. Deutsche Telekom launched the E-mail made in Germany initiative after a month of public indignation over reports on US snooping based on documents leaked by fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The spying scandal, which has filled German newspapers for weeks, has become a major headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel ahead of a Sept 22 election. Government snooping is a sensitive subject in Germany due to the heavy surveillance of citizens in the former communist East and under Hitlers Nazis.
The spying campaign has deeply rattled Germans, Deutsche Telekom Chief Executive Rene Obermann said at a news conference in Berlin on Friday to launch the initiative aiming to make email communication in Germany more secure. Deutsche Telekom and its partner United Internet, which account for about two-thirds of all email users in Germany, said they would protect clients emails via so-called SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption. This is an option already offered by Google. The former telecommunications monopoly, in which the German state remains the biggest investor with a 32 percent stake, said all data processing and storage would take place in Germany. This will make a big difference, said Sandro Gaycken, a professor of cyber security at Berlins Free University.
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, said Gaycken. German news magazine Der Spiegel reported in June, citing an NSA document, that the United States taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany in a typical month. Snooping fears will boost sales of IT security goods like virus scanners, firewalls and access administration tools, which had been expected to be worth 3.33 billion euros in Germany this year, up from 3.16 billion in 2012, according to the IT-market data provider International Data Corporation (IDC). But Bitkom, which represents more than 2,000 German IT companies, expects even higher demand after news of wholesale electronic surveillance by American and British intelligence. The reports about PRISM and Tempora have considerably raised awareness for IT security, Bitkom President Dieter Kempf said in a statement, adding that the market should now outpace the 5 percent growth that had been expected this year.
Stefan Frei, a research director at information security company NSS Labs, said the Telekom response was a step in the right direction. This initiative helps to tackle the-day-to-day sniffing around on the communication lines but it still doesnt prevent governments from getting information, Frei said.
The European Union is ranked as a key priority in a list of spying targets for the US National Security Agency, German weekly Der Spiegel said Saturday, citing a document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The classified document, dated April 2013, states that the US secret services are especially interested in gathering intelligence concerning the 28-member blocs foreign policy, international trade, and economic stability, the magazine reported.
Using a ranking system from one to five (from high to low importance), those three areas were given a number three ranking, according to the document seen by Der Spiegel. Topics related to new technology and energy security were assigned the lowest-level priority. Among individual countries, Washington reportedly listed China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea among its top surveillance targets.
Germany, France and Japan were considered of mid-level interest, the weekly added. The latest revelations appear to back up earlier NSA documents released by Snowden that claimed that Washington was snooping on EU offices in Brussels and in the States, sparking outrage among European countries, Der Spiegel said.
Snowdens leaks in recent weeks, which have revealed that the US is systematically seizing vast amounts of telephone and online data around the world, have proved a major headache for Washington and even threatened to derail a huge US-EU trade deal.
US President Barack Obama has scrambled to reassure allies and American citizens about the extent of the spying.
On Friday he pledged to overhaul US secret surveillance, promising greater oversight and transparency.
Snowden, who is wanted by the US on espionage charges, was granted temporary asylum in Russia earlier this month, a move that so angered Obama that he cancelled an upcoming high-profile meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
An encrypted email service believed to have been used by American fugitive Edward Snowden shut down abruptly on Thursday amid a legal fight that appeared to involve US government attempts to win access to customer information.
I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people, or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit, Lavabit LLC owner Ladar Levison wrote in a letter that was posted on the Texas-based companys website on Thursday.
Levison said he has decided to suspend operations but was barred from discussing the events over the past six weeks that led to his decision.
That matches the period since Snowden went public as the source of media reports detailing secret electronic spying operations by the US National Security Agency.
This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States, Levison wrote. The US Department of Justice had no immediate comment. Later on Thursday, an executive with a better-known provider of secure email said his company had also shut down that service. Jon Callas, co-founder of Silent Circle Inc, said on Twitter and in a blog post that Silent Circle had ended Silent Mail. We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now, Callas wrote on a blog addressed to customers. Silent Circle, co-founded by the PGP cryptography inventor Phil Zimmermann, will continue to offer secure texting and secure phone calls, but email is harder to keep truly private, Callas wrote. He and company representatives didnt immediately respond to interview requests.
At a Moscow news conference four weeks ago, a Human Rights Watch representative said she had been contacted by Snowden from a Lavabit email address, according to news website GlobalPost.com.
Use of effective encryption by regular email users is rare. Some of Snowdens leaked documents show that Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and other large providers have been compelled to help intelligence authorities gather email and other data on their users. The big providers and other companies typically offer encryption but said they cooperate with legal requests, including those by intelligence officials. Lavabit was something of an outlier, in part because it had said email was encrypted on its servers and could only be accessed with the users password.
