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Explore real-time news, visuallyGermany looks at keeping its Internet, e-mail traffic inside its borders 
KAI PFAFFENBACH/REUTERS - Germany said it received information that the NSA had bugged Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone. Stung by spying reports, Germany works to keep Internet and e-mail data within its borders.
By Michael Birnbaum,BERLIN — The news that the National Security Agency has its eye on much of the world’s electronic communications has shocked Germans, who have memories of Nazi and Cold War-era spying. Now, an alliance of German phone and Internet companies claims it has a solution: German e-mail and Internet transmitted within German borders.
The proposals — one for Internet, one for e-mail — aim to boost the security of Germany’s internal communications by preventing them from bouncing outside the country, which has far stricter privacy regulations than the United States. If a German customer wants to call up a German Web site, there is no reason that the data must pass through a server in Virginia, exposing the information to potential surveillance, advocates say. The same goes for e-mails within Germany.
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Some security professionals say the efforts are little more than a marketing gimmick, since Germans would still want to surf American Web pages — Facebook, anyone? — and the nation’s plans wouldn’t make doing so any more secure. The NSA could also still theoretically access German data on German soil, as could Germany’s intelligence agencies.
The case for the hopelessness of escaping monitoring was bolstered Friday when Britain’s Guardian newspaper published excerpts from a 2008 British intelligence document leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that said German intelligence agencies had drawn admiration from their British counterparts for their “good access to the heart of the internet.” Significant flows of data were already being monitored, according to the document, although the Guardian offered no specifics about whose data were being watched or to what end.
Still, for Germans who have been infuriated by a steady drip-drop of NSA allegations, including one that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone had been monitored for more than a decade, the German-only initiatives may be attractive. And in the United States, technology industry advocates say they are bracing for tough competition from foreign companies that boast that they are freer from U.S. intrusion and monitoring than American counterparts.
“You have to make sure that your data is exclusively stored in Germany, on German ground,” said Jan Oetjen, chief executive of GMX, one of Germany’s largest e-mail companies, which has teamed with the two other top German e-mail companies to offer a service called “E-Mail made in Germany.”
“Germans tend to be very sensitive to the use of their data, I think due to German history. Germans get taught at school to be cautious of a super-powerful state,” he said.
Google’s and Yahoo’s main bridges to the Internet were cracked by the NSA, allowing full access to the traffic passing through them, according to documents leaked to The Washington Post by Snowden. And, also based on Snowden documents, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported this week that spying was being conducted from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, just steps from the Brandenburg Gate.
The efforts to nationalize Internet traffic go beyond Germany. In Brazil, where President Dilma Rousseff was also allegedly monitored by the NSA, the government has pushed to require U.S. companies to store data about Brazilian customers inside Brazil. European Union leaders have advocated that their 28 nations develop “cloud” data storage that is independent from the United States.
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Stick Figures and Stunted Growth as Warring Syria Goes Hungry http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/middleeast/stick-figures-and-stunted-growth-as-warring-syria-goes-hungry.html?pagewanted=all Stick Figures and Stunted Growth as Warring Syria Goes HungryAcross Syria, a country that long prided itself on providing affordable food to its people, efforts to ensure basic sustenance appear to be failing, and millions are going hungry. @ahauslohner
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