A few weeks ago it was iPads banned from the UK’s No. 10 Downing Street due to spying fears, and now Apple products will start disappearing from the German parliament too.
The reason is concern about NSA eavesdropping, with Germany’s two major parties drawing up “urgent” guidelines that will see politicians only make calls on encrypted phones from this point forward. Sadly for Apple, the software being used is not currently iPhone-compatible, meaning that iPhones will no longer be permitted for official correspondence.
“Our conversations and communication structure have to be safer,” the German government report noted, following news that Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone was being tapped by US intelligence agencies.
This isn’t really an Apple problem so much as it is a software one, of course. Although third party call encryption software does exist for the iPhone, Germany is insistent that only software approved by the Bonn Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) be used. We guess that means that there’s a gap in the market for any company that want to start pushing new anti-spying encryption apps — or at least get them approved for parliamentary use.
For any developers out there who are interested…
Source: Thelocal.de
