
German government cancels Verizon contract in wake of U.S. spying row - JumpCrisscross
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/26/us-germany-security-verizon-idUSKBN0F11WJ20140626
======
jobu
_" The U.S. government cannot compel us to produce our customers' data stored
in data centres outside the U.S., and if it attempts to do so, we would
challenge that attempt in a court."_

Except that it would happen in a secret FISA court, and it's likely Verizon
wouldn't be allowed to reveal the status or outcome of that trial.

~~~
Maxious
Vodafone acknowledge that management and legal have no idea what these secret
requests are and what pressure is placed employees who push back on
governments requests when they violate their internal code of conduct,
"Obligations on individual employees managing agency and authority demands"
[http://www.vodafone.com/content/sustainabilityreport/2014/in...](http://www.vodafone.com/content/sustainabilityreport/2014/index/operating_responsibly/privacy_and_security/law_enforcement.html)

~~~
contingencies
_Amdocs knows Vodafone very well_ \- Friedrich Joussen, Chief Executive
Officer, Vodafone Deutschland.
[http://www.amdocs.com/About/Success/Pages/Vodafone-
Germany.a...](http://www.amdocs.com/About/Success/Pages/Vodafone-Germany.aspx)

Vodafone uses Amdocs in many of their national operations... see discussion in
other threads beneath this post. In short, Amdocs stuff is assumed to be
always-on metadata access rather than by-request content level.

------
joesmo
This needs to happen more. The only language the people running our government
understand is that of money. Perhaps if the executives running such companies
as Verizon (and by money-proxy, the US government) are denied their monetary
pleasures they'll lobby for reasonable governance.

~~~
Cyther606
This assumes the NSA would follow any laws restraining their powers. Even if
such laws were passed, how could the NSA ever prove to the public that they
were following the law? And even if the NSA took steps to "prove" they were
following the law, why would anyone believe them?

------
eliteraspberrie
It seems so obvious that government communication networks should be built and
run by a domestic company. Isn't that the standard in most developed
countries?

~~~
sgift
For some reasons that I will never understand my beloved government (that of
Germany) seemed to think for the longest time that the USA are our friends, US
companies are our friends and we should buy everything we can get from them.
And that includes government communication networks.

------
hadoukenio
#onlythebeginning

On another note, do the Israelis still eavesdrop on the White House phones?

    
    
      http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05/06/us/israeli-spy-inquiry-finds-nothing-officials-say.html

~~~
contingencies
Wow, that's a very early Amdocs news article.

From my understanding, as an outsourced billing provider, they mostly handle
metadata related to communications rather than communications themselves.

The number of mobile networks they have embedded themselves in globally is
absolutely shocking: most of the developed world.

Partial client lists are available on their website.

------
fletchowns
Could Verizon file suit against the US Government over this?

~~~
mpyne
They _could_ file suit for any number of things. But as far as I can tell the
only plausible argument would be breach of duty by the USG to keep their
secrets actually secret (i.e. why didn't they stop Snowden earlier), which was
one of the things Merkel was mad about.

------
trhway
does it mean that before Snowden they really trusted to the telecoms that
nobody captures and store their traffic? Or _wanted_ to trust?

Anyway, whatever provider they go with, they should encrypt point-to-point,
and thus provider isn't really important. One can't argue though with the God-
given right of the national telecom to exploit the hysteria to kick foreign
competitor off the fat government contracts :)

The wave of partitioning and protectionism happening in the Internet and other
global networks (like Russia trying to build their own VISA style pay system
and national/government supported search engine) starts to remind about global
trade partitioning leading to and through the Great Depression.

~~~
toufka
It seems likely that it simply wasn't given any thought. Not so much that they
did trust them, but that they didn't comprehend what _could_ have been done,
and so it never really bothered them that much.

Once it was made apparent just what the capabilities were, and how strongly
the NSA was utilizing those capabilities, minds started to change.

~~~
trhway
>It seems likely that it simply wasn't given any thought. Not so much that
they did trust them, but that they didn't comprehend what could have been
done, and so it never really bothered them that much.

To my knowledge, 20 years ago Russian security agencies were trying to inspect
in depth any foreign computer hardware (as there is no other computer hardware
existed back then or even today in Russia) that they were buying. Not that one
is able to seriously inspect beyond the level of the plastic body of a chip,
yet they tried at least :)

~~~
schoen
One is often able to inspect beyond that level.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=semiconductor+decapsulation](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=semiconductor+decapsulation)

The fact that these techniques do work fairly well for semiconductor reverse
engineering is a reason that recent research on "stealthy dopant-level
hardware Trojans" was scary.

[http://www.iacr.org/workshops/ches/ches2013/presentations/CH...](http://www.iacr.org/workshops/ches/ches2013/presentations/CHES2013_Session4_3.pdf)

Though maybe that's what your reference to the inability to "seriously"
inspect chips refers to. :-)

This research produces optically indistinguishable ICs with different
electrical properties, which hinders optical reverse engineering.

My impression is that there's still a semiconductor device reverse engineering
technique which likely defeats this measure (FIB imaging)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focused_ion_beam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focused_ion_beam)

as well as some other microscopy techniques that might conceivably detect
these differences, but that it's more difficult and expensive overall compared
to optical imaging.

~~~
schoen
I just saw on the cryptography mailing list that some researchers have
succeeded in using both SEM and FIB to see the stealthy dopants:

[https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/508](https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/508)

So maybe the dopants have to get even stealthier if they're to avoid expert
semiconductor reverse engineers. :-)

------
mantraxD
Not that Verizon are angels, but notice how all those "government doesn't like
another government" passive aggressive actions end up hitting people and
companies who have no fault at all for a given government policy.

Case in point, Germany doesn't like what U.S. does - boom, Verizon takes a
shot.

U.S. and few other countries don't like the anti-gay laws of Uganda. Boom,
poor Uganda citizens take a shot (aids get cut).

U.S. doesn't like North Korea's policy. Boom, poor citizens take one again.

Obviously there's no channel where said governments can express themselves,
maybe we should have a social network for governments where they can rant and
vent off, instead of having innocent third parties suffer?

~~~
DarqWebster
In this particular instance though, according to the article, some negotiation
was done between the two governments to reach a no-spy agreement.

As no agreement could be reached, an American company cannot offer the service
required by the German government. Thus is it not reasonable for the contract
to be cancelled?

This is not a shot at an innocent third party, this is the third party being
constrained by American laws to the extent that it cannot offer a required
service. Sure, it is unfortunate that a third party is adversely affected by
this, but it cannot be portrayed as a deliberate act against them by the
German government.

