Thanks to NSA, German e-mail providers see flood of new customers

[CyberAbc 290]

Thanks to NSA, German e-mail providers see flood of new customers

 

 

The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs may have hurt US cloud providers' business, but they've created a boom in German e-mail hosting.

According to a new report by Der Spiegel, Germany's major Internet service providers have seen a surge of new users in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations about US Internet monitoring. In particular, the German ISP Freenet has seen an 80 percent growth in new customers over the past three weeks.

Deutsche Telekom has used concerns over US surveillance as part of its marketing campaign. This month, the company (along with two other firms, GMX and Web.de—the three collectively serve two-thirds of German e-mail users) launched a new campaign called "E-mail Made in Germany," designed to ensure that customers' domestic e-mail never leaves servers within Germany. E-mail messages within the service are encrypted, and users are warned when a message is being sent outside the safety of the trusted network.

However, as Ars has reported previously, German security experts have scoffed at this marketing ploy. Further, using German e-mail services is no guarantee that someone won't go rifling through your messages.

While Germany certainly has strong data protection and privacy laws, using a German e-mail provider does not necessarily provide users more protection. In fact, it might offer less protection, especially to US-based users, since their message traffic would likely pass through exchanges monitored by the NSA's XKeyscore system.