Germany deals with its own Spygate
Deutsche Telekom accused of snooping
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Nearly 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a scandal engulfing German telco giant Deutsche Telekom has brought back chilling memories of East Germany's infamous secret police, the Stasi, made famous in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Oscar-winning "The Lives of Others."
Prosecutors launched an investigation after the telco confessed to spying on senior execs and journalists in an effort to identify the sources of press leaks in 2005 and 2006, although new allegations accuse the company of spying as far back as 2000.
Most shocking is the discovery that one of the outside firms hired to track the phone calls, Berlin-based Desa Investigation and Risk Protection, is owned and operated by two former East German Stasi officials.
The affair has intensified opposition to the government's new anti-terror bill that would expand the police's ability to stake out suspects, from wiretapping homes to installing minicameras and even bugging personal computers.
The Deutsche Telekom probe, which recalls the 2006 spying scandal at Hewlett Packard, follows similar breaches of privacy by Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, which last year confessed to spying on journalists for years while searching for a mole in its own ranks.
