Germany’s state owned telecom company Deutsche Telekom has urged the domestic telecom companies to join hands to secure communication from snooping of foreign intelligence agencies, following revelations that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone was monitored by NSA.
Deutsche Telekom has come up with the suggestion after Germany said last week that it has evidence that Merkel’s phone was snooped on.
Though US denies the report, a German publication Der Spiegel claimed that Merkel’s phone number had been listed by the US NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 and could have been monitored for more than a decade, according to Guardian.
Der Spiegel reported the nature of the monitoring of the phone is not clear yet but there are chances that Merkel’s mobile phone conversations were recorded, or the contacts were assessed.
German government’s deputy spokesman Georg Streiter was quoted by the paper as saying that a high-level delegation will meet US authorities to press for investigations into earlier surveillance allegations.
Experts believe that if the internet is walled up in the country, it would be difficult for Germans to access services like Google and Facebook which are hosted in other countries, according experts cited by Reuters.
If Germany wants its own internet, then it needs to have local hosting of websites, which is not yet supported by German leaders.
According to Reuters, Deutsche Telekom has refused to comment whether it will lobby for such an approach.
