Germany is considering creating their own walled off Internet in the wake of revelations that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone was probably monitored continuously over the last eleven years by the NSA.
State-backed Deutsche Telekom is currently urging other German communications firms to "cooperate to shield local Internet traffic from foreign intelligence services" such as the National Security Agency (NSA), Reuters reported on Friday.
In September it was revealed that the U.S. agency could monitor almost any smartphone on the planet, Der Spiegel reported back then the phone tapping, which was speculated to have surfaced after American filmmaker and Der Spiegal author Laura Poitras obtained the information through whistleblower Snowden, was not a mass surveillance tactic and claimed only certain individuals of interest were targeted.
In a telephone call with the German Chancellor, U.S. President Barack Obama initially denied the claims before later admitting that it did happen (but didn't know about it) and that he personally put a stop to it after finding out, but Merkel was reportedly livid over the allegations during the call.
Germany is considered to be one of the most privacy-conscious countries in the world, and such revelations only serves to fan the flames for the need of greater European legislation on privacy laws, which are currently being beefed up by Germany and France and hope to be passed in 2015 by the member states.
Of course, the flip side is that if a walled Internet does indeed happen, popular sites such as Google and Facebook would no longer be reachable as they are hosted in the U.S., the move would probably prove unpopular with German citizens, like those in countries like Iran and China, where much of the worldwide web is censored, or simply unavailable due to their restrictive Internet.
Source & Image: ITProPortal
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