Germany could turn to typewriters to combat NSA spying

The chairman of the German parliament’s NSA investigative committee, Patrick Sensburg, is considering having his group use old-fashioned, manual typewriters when creating important documents. Since this process would forego the use of digital technology, and only a physical copy would exist, it would be nearly impossible for the NSA to gets its hands on the sensitive data that is stored on the documents. Speaking on the German public television channel, Sensburg claimed that the committee is taking its operational security very seriously. “In fact, we already have a typewriter, and it’s even a non-electronic typewriter,” he said.

Sensburg is taking a page out of the Russian playbook with his typewriter initiative. Last year, the Russian agency in charge of securing communications from the Kremlin announced that it wanted to spend 486,000 rubles ($14,800) to buy twenty electric typewriters as a way to avoid digital leaks. However, in addition to the typewriting initiative, Sensbur announced publicly that he was going to have a security audit performed on his smartphone. “I’m going to ask the other chairmen and committee members to have their phones checked at once,” he said.

The German NSA investigative committee was founded in March with the goal of specifically investigating “whether, in what way, and on what scale” the United States and the other members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance “collected or are collecting data” to, from, and within Germany. Sensburg has been has been trying to figure out a way to get NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to testify before his committee. However, bringing Snowden in for questioning, much less asylum, is virtually impossible despite the efforts of numerous German politicians.

Sensburg’s announcement came on the same day that German authorities arrested an employee of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BDC), the German intelligence agency. The employee, a man by the name of Markus, was arrested on suspicions of being a spy for the CIA. Markus allegedly approached the CIA via e-mail in 2012 to share German intelligence, and the offer was accepted. Over the course of three in-person meetings with CIA agents in Austria, Markus allegedly provided 218 documents for the American intelligence agency, for which he was paid about $34,000. In May, German intelligence intercepted an unencrypted email that Markus allegedly sent to the Russian consulate in Munich, which is what put German authorities on his trail.

The last few months have been marked with numerous spying scandals between the United States and Germany. Relations between the two long-standing allies are starting to fray. Klaus Scharioth, the former German ambassador to the United States, went so far as to call the present situation the worst crisis in US-German relations since World War II. Read more about this story here.