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Don't use any of these email providers. First up, they are not trustworthy, especially Deutsche Telekom. DT is the privatised former state-owned telco monopolis

Don't use any of these email providers. First up, they are not trustworthy, especially Deutsche Telekom. DT is the privatised former state-owned telco monopolist, with a gigantic share of userbase and partial ownership by the German federal state. Most likely, every intelligence agency, domestic or foreign, that is operating in Germany with sanction of the government will have access to anything on their servers. Also there is Quellen-TKÜ, which means that every single one of the three gives access to their servers to German law enforcement. If I remember correctly, the Quellen-TKÜ law says that any online service provider that has more than X users (10k?) has to provide access to law enforcement in such a way that the provider operators themselves don't know about the individuall access operations.

junto 13y ago
That isn't the point is it? The step forward here is that the comumunications between these providers is now encrypted by default and foreign entities such as the NSA will now have a harder job to do traffic and content analysis on German emails being sent to and from German nationals. I don't have a problem with a German judge in a German court, granting a search warrant with reasonable grounds where all checks and balances are in place. I do have a problem with secret courts with secret laws and gag orders hiding this kind of thing from the public. If foreign intelligence agencies are allegedly granted unhindered access to their servers then I see that as a scandal. Have you got any evidence to back up that claim?
- sentenza 13y ago
  In principle I agree with you and I think you are right considering what the police is allowed to do and what not. As far as I know, a judge still needs to sign a warrant for the police to do anything. However... https://netzpolitik.org/2013/500-millionen-verbindungsdaten-im-monat-bnd-betreibt-vorratsdatenspeicherung-durch-die-hintertur/ https://netzpolitik.org/2013/500-millionen-verbindungsdaten-... I would be really surprised if the BND wasn't using that same access infrastructure (admittedly as supposition on my part). Combined with the story on how the BND protects our data by removing email addresses that end on .de, this again becomes worst case-ish. Now this is only metadata, but at least in the case of email, processing the metadata means having parsed the message. Since the infrastructure is supposed to be set up in such a way that they get it from the server of the provider, encrypting the communication with said provider is kind of useless, at least in regard to the NSA. I'd also like to add that your comment makes an important point. Most people, including me, are quite OK with law enforcement operating under the rule of law within clear boundaries in this realm. But how do we get the intelligence community from hitchhiking on the law enforcement infrastructure?
- mpyne 13y ago
  Google encrypts their email by default when exchanging with the majority of email providers (including, presumably, the German ones mentioned here, as long as they already support TLS). Likewise even German law permits surveillance on foreign communications (see the "BND Section" of their legal code). What this here is, is marketing. Not that it's bad marketing, but it doesn't solve any of the real issues.
- tomphoolery 13y ago
  What if it was a German court doing the gagging? http://m.sueddeutsche.de/inm/sz/nwpxunrf8al6a;jsessionid=481D070A5BFA383DEE6C0E86A1886CE0.inm-app-prod01A2 http://m.sueddeutsche.de/inm/sz/nwpxunrf8al6a;jsessionid=481...
- OGC 13y ago
  I can't find a link right now, but AFAIK, one of the NSA bases is basically right next (in terms of a couple kms) to a T-Online company hq.
pepr 13y ago
The point here isn't that ANY government can't listen on. That's a noble goal but so not achievable in a short period of time for everyone. The goal here is that German citizen isn't spied on by the US government because the US government has shown utter lack of respect to rights of anyone who isn't a US citizen. The point here is that if your own democratic government is spying on you, you have some (albeit limited) degree of control (elections) and rights (because you're voter, so they care about you). When a foreign government spies on you, you have almost zero control.
- sentenza 13y ago
  Indeed. But it is important to note that any data collected by German intelligence agencies will be made available to other intelligence agencies, including the US ones, due to cooperation agreements in place. Unfortunately, some of these cooperation agreements are inherited from the immediate postwar history and it remains unclear whether they even can be modified or revoked.
  - junto 13y ago
    I can almost stomach that over absolute mass analysis and storage in Utah of everything I say, email or browse, when I'm not a US citizen.
- lazyjones 13y ago
  > The goal here is that German citizen isn't spied on by the US government because ... and what they actually achieve is that german citizens are spied on by the BND, which forwards everything to the NSA. And no, you have no democratic control over this in Germany because the german government is a corrupt bunch of liars too. At every Snowden leak regarding the BND/NSA cooperation, they changed their fairy tales a little bit.
- GauntletWizard 13y ago
  And Germany has, currently and historically, shown an utter contempt for the rights of it's citizens, far moreso than the current US crisis. Germany talks a good game with their data privacy laws, but those only affect citizens data being collected by corporations; They've dramatically increased their data collection laws[1], and while some have been found unconstitutional (Look up the Telecommunications Databank opinion), they've quickly been reworded and re-enacted[2]. Because of German data seizure laws, they believe they can request any data about or belonging to any German citizen without a warrant, so long as that data resides in Germany. At least one large cloud provider has German datacenters, but will not use them for storage of any German citizens data because of this. [1]: http://idpl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/10/idpl.ips026.full http://idpl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/10/idpl... [2]: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html
mrottenkolber 13y ago
Second this. Internationals might think this sounds like some case of german quality engineering. Not. "All encrption done by the providers." says it all. It's a farce. And I have to agree to some people in this thread, that germany IT engineering lacks behind a lot. Either our tech education is as bad as I think it is, or I don't know what. But this whole de-mail thing started as an initiative by the postal service to develop a "e-post-brief" aiming to be an official/secure/non-deniable electronic postal service. Which is ridiculous. I think the technical right thing to do (safe, anonymous communication) is just not what any state would want. It doesn't help consumerism and it doesn't protect the ruling social norms so why would a state fund it?

junto 13y ago

That isn't the point is it? The step forward here is that the comumunications between these providers is now encrypted by default and foreign entities such as the NSA will now have a harder job to do traffic and content analysis on German emails being sent to and from German nationals. I don't have a problem with a German judge in a German court, granting a search warrant with reasonable grounds where all checks and balances are in place. I do have a problem with secret courts with secret laws and gag orders hiding this kind of thing from the public. If foreign intelligence agencies are allegedly granted unhindered access to their servers then I see that as a scandal. Have you got any evidence to back up that claim?

sentenza 13y ago
In principle I agree with you and I think you are right considering what the police is allowed to do and what not. As far as I know, a judge still needs to sign a warrant for the police to do anything. However... https://netzpolitik.org/2013/500-millionen-verbindungsdaten-im-monat-bnd-betreibt-vorratsdatenspeicherung-durch-die-hintertur/ https://netzpolitik.org/2013/500-millionen-verbindungsdaten-... I would be really surprised if the BND wasn't using that same access infrastructure (admittedly as supposition on my part). Combined with the story on how the BND protects our data by removing email addresses that end on .de, this again becomes worst case-ish. Now this is only metadata, but at least in the case of email, processing the metadata means having parsed the message. Since the infrastructure is supposed to be set up in such a way that they get it from the server of the provider, encrypting the communication with said provider is kind of useless, at least in regard to the NSA. I'd also like to add that your comment makes an important point. Most people, including me, are quite OK with law enforcement operating under the rule of law within clear boundaries in this realm. But how do we get the intelligence community from hitchhiking on the law enforcement infrastructure?
mpyne 13y ago
Google encrypts their email by default when exchanging with the majority of email providers (including, presumably, the German ones mentioned here, as long as they already support TLS). Likewise even German law permits surveillance on foreign communications (see the "BND Section" of their legal code). What this here is, is marketing. Not that it's bad marketing, but it doesn't solve any of the real issues.
tomphoolery 13y ago
What if it was a German court doing the gagging? http://m.sueddeutsche.de/inm/sz/nwpxunrf8al6a;jsessionid=481D070A5BFA383DEE6C0E86A1886CE0.inm-app-prod01A2 http://m.sueddeutsche.de/inm/sz/nwpxunrf8al6a;jsessionid=481...
OGC 13y ago
I can't find a link right now, but AFAIK, one of the NSA bases is basically right next (in terms of a couple kms) to a T-Online company hq.

pepr 13y ago

The point here isn't that ANY government can't listen on. That's a noble goal but so not achievable in a short period of time for everyone. The goal here is that German citizen isn't spied on by the US government because the US government has shown utter lack of respect to rights of anyone who isn't a US citizen. The point here is that if your own democratic government is spying on you, you have some (albeit limited) degree of control (elections) and rights (because you're voter, so they care about you). When a foreign government spies on you, you have almost zero control.

sentenza 13y ago
Indeed. But it is important to note that any data collected by German intelligence agencies will be made available to other intelligence agencies, including the US ones, due to cooperation agreements in place. Unfortunately, some of these cooperation agreements are inherited from the immediate postwar history and it remains unclear whether they even can be modified or revoked.
- junto 13y ago
  I can almost stomach that over absolute mass analysis and storage in Utah of everything I say, email or browse, when I'm not a US citizen.
lazyjones 13y ago
> The goal here is that German citizen isn't spied on by the US government because ... and what they actually achieve is that german citizens are spied on by the BND, which forwards everything to the NSA. And no, you have no democratic control over this in Germany because the german government is a corrupt bunch of liars too. At every Snowden leak regarding the BND/NSA cooperation, they changed their fairy tales a little bit.
GauntletWizard 13y ago
And Germany has, currently and historically, shown an utter contempt for the rights of it's citizens, far moreso than the current US crisis. Germany talks a good game with their data privacy laws, but those only affect citizens data being collected by corporations; They've dramatically increased their data collection laws[1], and while some have been found unconstitutional (Look up the Telecommunications Databank opinion), they've quickly been reworded and re-enacted[2]. Because of German data seizure laws, they believe they can request any data about or belonging to any German citizen without a warrant, so long as that data resides in Germany. At least one large cloud provider has German datacenters, but will not use them for storage of any German citizens data because of this. [1]: http://idpl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/10/idpl.ips026.full http://idpl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/10/idpl... [2]: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html

mrottenkolber 13y ago

Second this. Internationals might think this sounds like some case of german quality engineering. Not. "All encrption done by the providers." says it all. It's a farce. And I have to agree to some people in this thread, that germany IT engineering lacks behind a lot. Either our tech education is as bad as I think it is, or I don't know what. But this whole de-mail thing started as an initiative by the postal service to develop a "e-post-brief" aiming to be an official/secure/non-deniable electronic postal service. Which is ridiculous. I think the technical right thing to do (safe, anonymous communication) is just not what any state would want. It doesn't help consumerism and it doesn't protect the ruling social norms so why would a state fund it?