Photo Gallery Germany Learns to Mistrust America
After the revelations of large-scale data mining by the United States, German managers have become even more nervous about data security and are scrambling to rapidly bolster security measures. Here, Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), speaks at a convention for IT security professionals in Las Vegas.
This sense of anxiety has become widespread in Germany ever since Edward Snowden revealed the extent of NSA spying. "We are noticing that companies have become more sensitive in recent weeks," says Michael George, the head of the Cyber Alliance Center at the Bavarian State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the state branch of Germany's domestic intelligence agency. "When it comes to industrial espionage, they had focused almost exclusively on the East. And now they're wondering whether the threat might not also be coming from the West."
The problem in fending off espionage is that many potential access points must be monitored at the same time. SAP, the German software giant, alone sees about 3,000 attacks a month. Throughout Germany, the number of attacks is allegedly in the hundreds of thousands -- per day.
SAP headquarters in Walldorf: Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), in particular, are contacting the experts at the state agency and asking some very basic questions: What about products made by US software companies, such as Microsoft, that are commonly used by German companies? Should managers still use Skype for meetings? In addition to hacker attacks from China and Russia, do SMEs now have to worry about industrial espionage originating in the United States?
It would be wrong to say that efforts aren't made to protect business secrets in Germany. On the contrary, the precautionary measures taken by German companies sometimes read like a chapter from a John Grisham novel -- or, in some cases, like pages from a medical textbook on paranoia. At the specialty chemicals giant Evonik, managers are required to store their mobile phones in cookie tins during meetings, the idea being that the tins will serve as Faraday cages that prevent anyone from listening in on their conversations.
Ferdinand Piëch (left), the chairman of Volkswagen's supervisory board, has conference rooms regularly swept for bugs, and the company even has its own airline, Volkswagen Air Services, so that employee travel can't be as easily tracked. When BMW managers fly to other countries, they leave their company-issued mobile phones at home in Munich. In their place, they are given disposable phones to be discarded upon return.
At the aerospace group EADS, employees are not permitted to use iPads or iPhones at work. Only Blackberrys are allowed. Employees working in high-security areas are also not allowed to read work-related emails outside their sealed-off offices. Many sensitive documents are reportedly being hand-delivered within the company now, as well, instead of being sent electronically.
German companies and consumers once had a lot of confidence in everything coming from the United States. But it's already clear that much of this faith has been lost. Demonstrators hold a banner during a protest against the supposed surveillance by the US National Security Agency, NSA, and the German intelligence agency, BND, during a rally in front of the construction site of the new headquarters of German intelligence agency in Berlin.
Since the NSA's surveillance methods were revealed, the Düsseldorf-based company Secusmart has seen a growing interest in its tap-proof mobile phones from companies. In a few weeks, Secusmart will provide the German government with ordinary Blackberrys that operate with a special card about the size of a fingernail. As soon as the caller speaks into the phone's microphone, the words are encoded. The phones will cost German taxpayers 2,500 ($3,300) a piece.
