14 DAY TRIAL // For anyone still wondering if the NSA scandal has had any impact on the tech and telecommunications companies in the United States, Germany has decided to make it pretty clear by cutting off Verizon from the list of companies providing service for government ministries.
Not only has Germany decided to rely on the local Deutsche Telekom, but it has already made a point of highlighting that the move was due to concerns over the NSA’s wiretapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other top officials’ phones, Reuters reports.
Verizon is one of the top telecommunications companies in the United States and, at the same time, one of the first companies that were named in the NSA scandal. Now, it has become one of the first businesses to be able to say with conviction that it has issues because of the intelligence security agency.
According to media reports based on the NSA leaked files, Verizon is forced by the NSA to provide millions of instances of metadata each day. While metadata may not seem like much since it does not include actual conversation content, it still can tell a lot about the people targeted, including the identities of those one talks to, work schedules, sleep patterns, and even religious beliefs.
While the United States and Germany are long-time allies, documents exposed in the past year paint a completely different picture where the US chooses to spy not only on millions of people in Germany, where it collects tens of millions of metadata records each day, but also on the country’s leaders. Even the parliament was being spied on from a building nearby.
After all, it was only a few days after Merkel expressed her concern that she might be spied on and the White House denied it that proof of that ended up in newspapers around the world.
Germany has reacted quite strongly to the news, but it has been mindful of the diplomatic relationship it has with the United States. The idea of inviting Edward Snowden to testify about the NSA’s practices for the sake of an internal investigation has been discussed more times than we can count. While the benefits of inviting Snowden over are obvious, Germany’s lawmakers believe that doing such a thing would bring upon them the criticism of the White House.
Furthermore, there’s also the issue of assuring Snowden’s safety on the trip and within the country, especially since the United States wants to arrest the whistleblower who is currently under Russian protection.