Germany: We Think NSA May Have Tapped Chancellor Merkel's Cell Phone 267
cold fjord writes "According to a report in the Miami Herald, 'Chancellor Angela Merkel has called President Barack Obama after receiving information that U.S. intelligence may have targeted her mobile phone. Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said Merkel made clear in Wednesday's call that "she views such practices, if the indications are confirmed ... as completely unacceptable" and called for U.S. authorities to clarify the extent of surveillance in Germany.' Der Spiegel has some information on Germany's own "PRISM" project. White House spokesman Jay Carney said President Obama 'assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor' her communications. He didn't mention anything about past communications. This news follows allegations of U.S. surveillance of the Presidents of Mexico, and France. Yesterday the LA Times noted, 'French authorities are shocked — shocked — to learn that the American government is spying on French citizens. The Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. ambassador to the Quai D'Orsay to inform him that what's going on is "unacceptable," and President Francois Hollande claimed to have issued a stern rebuke to President Obama in a phone conversation.' Up until now, Merkel had been reluctant to say anything bad about the U.S. over the NSA leaks."
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Informative)
I am shocked. Shocked! That a country--any country--would spy on a foreign head of state.
What a world we live in
As long as you are "shocked, shocked," in this manner [youtube.com], you are correct.
NSA, France and spy wars [latimes.com]
Naturally, the French would be outraged. What government would be happy to learn that a close ally was secretly monitoring its people? Then again, it was revealed in 2010 that France conducts its own espionage activities here on U.S. soil. What's more, French officials have been aware of the NSA program in France for months. Oh, and also, France's intelligence agencies have established an electronic surveillance system of their own that monitors their citizens' phone conversations, emails, texts and even their Twitter posts.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh. Have you red the articles? And understood them? The numbers appeared on some phone bills, not everyones. And as I use posteo, have you understood wjühat the guy from posteo was saying? There is no way a court would allow all mailboxes being searched or to order them to hand over ALL mailbocüxes to get some of them.
Posteo allows for complete anonymous use of their service, paying could be done with a reference number in an envelope. The laws allows to throw away any data if not needed for the billing, so they do that. They can not identify you if you chose the tin foil hat payment method at all.
Posteo offers to encrypt the CalDAV and CardDAV-accounts not only with their system-wide key, but with the users password, so they can not get the data stored there themselves. 32-character, strong password, so good luck with the decryption. And all this opportunity costs for learning that I have nothing much to hide. Making it as hard as I could to get the useless information should be a fun sport for every geek worldwide. Oh, did I mention they replace my IP in emails with theirs and are working an passwordencryption of the IMAP-account as well?
Have you red the ars technica article and understood what the podteo guy was saying? About our CURRENT laws and our CURRENT situation?
Not so much, did you?
We have overboarding surveillance, but your non existing privacy continues to be a wet dream for our executive powers and some polticians. The danger of my data being compromised is smaller by high factors when using posteo or suisse providers compared to the complete transparent and willingly weakened products of american companies. Good citizens like the lavabit-guy or Zimmerman excluded.
There is surveillance is not equal to "we try to get every single bit of everyone eveytime". Data retention may come to my country as well and I fought against it. But what the Constitutional Court left over from the cases in which the data could be used is absolutely incomparable to the complete Orwellian Scheme of your country. And Data retention is in the debate again thanks to Mr. Snowden. The Data Retention and access to the Data was attempted to be nearly unrestricted. But the constitutional court did not let it stand. I still hate everyone that promotes data retention after two dictatures in the last 100 years. But the checks and balances actually worked as far as the original law is null and void.
Inform yourself. I have no problems with tapped mailboxes if there is some evidence for extremely serious crimes, like the posteo guy was suggesting. Data retention on the other hand is bad. But as stated by our constitutional court, it can not be as bad as it is in your country.
So stop spreading FUD, it is bad enough here as it is already. Thank you very much.