Deutsche Welle, 12 October 2013
Deutsche
Telekom is pushing to shield Internet traffic from spies by routing it through
German servers. Outrage followed revelations that US surveillance programs had
accessed the private messages of German citizens.
Telekom had
already announced that it would channel local email traffic through servers
within Germany, but the push for cooperation with competitors represents a new
element. The company aims to reach an agreement with other Internet providers
that any data transmitted domestically would not leave German borders, said
Thomas Kremer, a member of Bonn-based Telekom's board of management for data
privacy, legal affairs and compliance.
"In a
next step, this initiative could be expanded to the Schengen area," Kremer
said, referring to the 26 EU countries - excluding Britain - that have
abandoned controls on land borders.
Revelations of snooping by the secret services of the United States and Britain leaked by
the fugitive former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden
further fueled the privacy debate within Germany. The news magazine Spiegel
reported in June that the US taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text
messages in Germany in a typical month. Government snooping remains a sensitive
subject in Germany, after decades of heavy surveillance of citizens in the
former East and years of it nationwide under Hitler's Nazis.
"We
want to guarantee that no byte between senders and recipients within Germany
will even temporarily cross the border," Kremer said.
The
magazine WirtschaftsWoche reported that companies such as Vodafone and
Telefonica would consider whether to join the plan by Germany's biggest
Internet provider. QSC, another Telekom competitor, has, however, questioned
the feasibility of the plan to shield traffic, calling it impossible to
determine clearly whether data would travel nationally or internationally, the
magazine reported.
mkg/hc (Reuters, AFP, dpa)
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