To Dodge US Spies, Germany Might Keep All Its Internet Traffic on Local Servers

Germany is the latest country to send a message to the US government to avert its snooping gaze from Europe's internet. The country's biggest telcom company, Deutsche Telekom, has a plan to avoid the NSA's online surveillance: Restrict all internet traffic in Germany to local servers.

Deutsche Telekom is pushing to get the country's other telecom firms on board. Eventually, the telecom giant would like to expand the US-free network throughout much of Europe, as Reutersreported this weekend. So far, the other leading ISPs in Germany, like Vodafone, Telefonica, and QSC, haven't said whether they're game to join Deutsche Telekom in its ambitious plan.

There’s good reason to hesitate. For one, there’s the question of whether German netizens are worried enough about their online privacy to fuel a demand for an all-local web infrastructure.

On the one hand, domestic surveillance is not something that sits well with Germans. There have been a spate of anti-NSA protests since Edward Snowden leaked details about the US's various surveillance programs, especially since the leaks revealed that Germany is one of the most-monitored countries under the NSA’s XKeyscore program. On top of that, German President Angela Merkel has defended the NSA’s spying, and Germany’s own spy agency, the BND, is in bed with US intelligence.

On the other hand, Merkel was handily reelected even in the midst of the post-Snowden privacy concerns. Some people took that as a sign that Germans weren't as outraged about the country's surveillance strategy as it might've seemed at first blush.

There’s also the question of whether it's even possible to route internet traffic exclusively through German connections. This is what the ISP QSC is worried about, the company told Reuters. It’s a question other countries are asking too, namely Brazil, which has been outspoken about wanting to build an internet shielded from the US government's wandering eye.

Brazil has even laid out a multi-point plan for how to go about severing ties with the US-controlled cyberspace. It wants to open data centers in Brazil that are subject to the country's privacy laws, take data out of the cloud and store it locally in these centers, and finish the ongoing development of the BRICS undersea broadband cable connecting Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Just today, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff confirmed the country’s plans to create a secure email service to "prevent possible espionage."

But the prevailing opinion among experts is that it would be extremely hard to control where internet traffic goes. “The internet doesn't have what is called 'source routing',” Joss Wright, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institut, recently told me. “That means that you can't say where you want your traffic to go. You just send information with a destination, and the internet conspires to work out how to get that message there.”

For its part, Deutsche Telekom hasn't announced the details of its plans, other than referring to a secure email service it launched this summer in response to the NSA. The service, nicknamed “Made in Germany,” stores emails exclusively on German servers.