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Germany is thinking about using manual typewriters to evade US snooping.
According to The Guardian, the head of the Bundestag’s parliamentary inquiry into National Security Agency (NSA) activity in Germany – Christian Democrat politican Patrick Sensburg – said in an interview with Morgenmagazin TV that he and his colleagues were considering tossing email completely.
From The Guardian’s translation:
Interviewer: Are you considering typewriters?
Sensburg: As a matter of fact, we have - and not electronic models either.
Surprised interviewer: Really?
Sensburg: Yes, no joke.
The NSA inquiry, which began in May 2014, is charged with determining:
...whether, in what way and on what scale ... the intelligence services of the "Five Eyes" states (United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) collected or are collecting data ... from, to and in Germany. ...
Sensburg noted that US snooping is ongoing.
In fact, spies may even be listening in on the inquiry itself.
On Monday, German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported (Google translation) that two Bundestag members had evidence that their phones had been tapped.
Also, the proceedings of the parliamentary committee were rocked on 3 July by an announcement that Germany’s intelligence agency – the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND – had discovered a double agent in its ranks.
On 3 July, news broke that the suspect admitted not only to selling secret documents to Russian intelligence, but also to offering to pass on to the NSA confidential information about the inquiry.
He was later identified as Markus R., a 31-year old employee of BND, who’d been arrested on suspicion of spying for the Americans.
According to Reuters, Markus R. had a desk job at the BND’s headquarters in southern Germany, working for a department responsible for protecting soldiers serving abroad.
Sources said that he contacted the CIA by email in 2012, offering to hand over information coming from his workplace, which handles message traffic between headquarters and the German agency’s out-stations around the world.
They must have been pretty happy to take it: he told investigators he met with a CIA agent three times in Austria, on top of plenty of email exchanges. Some of the documents Marcus R. passed on concerned the parliament’s NSA investigation.
Berlin expelled the top CIA agent in Germany following discovery of yet another spying suspect.
Sensburg had this to say:
Unlike other inquiry committees, we are investigating an ongoing situation. Intelligence activities are still going on, they are happening.
Germany’s race to the air-gapped technology bottom surpasses that of Russia, which last year reportedly proclaimed it was going to buy 20 Triumph-Adler electric typewriters.
Russia’s choice of using supposedly spy-proof electronic typewriters is ironic.
Soviets in the 70s installed keyloggers – actual keystroke recorders – on one of the first and most popular models, IBM’s “Selectric”, in at least 12 machines at US embassy buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
As far as Germany’s (manual) typewriter plans go, Sensburg is not, mind you, a Luddite. Besides considering the use of typewriters, he also announced publicly that he plans to have the NSA committees’ mobile phones subjected to a security audit.
Ars Technica quotes him:
I'm going to ask the other chairmen and committee members to have their phones checked at once.
But how spy-proof are even manual typewriters?
After all, as buggable as electronic communications are, paper documents can still be stolen, photographed, lost in a fire, or left in a briefcase in a public place.
So what does that leave?
Image of typewriter courtesy of Shutterstock.
Have they considered encryption? Germans did invent the Enigma Machine. Perhaps encryption may just slow them down, but it would be better than nothing.
And the Enigma code was broken, remember?
And an unencrypted document doesn’t need any code to be broken.
Our country has really gotten to become to the pariah of the world as far as spying goes.We once talked of “other” countries being the axis of evil, but the meaning of the phrase makes you really wonder….
All countries spy, but the only difference is the US had its spying secrets leaked while other countries are smarter with whom they choose to allow access to their secrets.
As one of the linked articles says, don’t be fooled by Germany’s “surprise” about being spied on. Their intelligence agencies work closely with US intelligence agencies and I highly doubt there is no one spying on the US for Germany.
Compare the craven attitude of the British to Germany’s attitude. We are planning to give them them the BBC and the NHS too.
Because acoustics can’t be taken from noisy typewriters at a pretty good distance…..
I think I’ll buy some stock in a German carbon paper manufacturing company.
So I’m thinking what if the constant abuse and spying that occurs through the internet get’s it removed from the public? What if internet use becomes a privilege and not a right? Ready to face the consequences?
When did the internet become a right? Why is it many 3rd world areas don’t have internet? Money, my friend. It still takes money to have access to the internet.
And what about those pesky typewriter ribbons? You can recreate everything from the impressions left on them. What happens when they go missing?
Neither electric nor manual typewriters are a fail-safe. Keystrokes can be determined by sound on the manual ones. The electronic ones are subject to having their electronic steps recorded via changes in their magnetic field (etc.)
Manual Typewriting can probably be made spy-proof (sound-proof rooms, burn the ribbons etc), but can you make the surrounding (human) environment spy-proof?
People will photocopy and photocopiers can be bugged
People will carry exposed papers (especially UK policemen and politicians walking past zoom lenses outside 10 Downing Street)