Edward Snowden revelations prompt crisis of trust in Germany

When Germany's federal criminal police office needs to share sensitive information these days, employees type the particulars and get them hand-delivered.

Last year, agents would have trusted the security of e-mail. But that was before Edward Snowden and the revelations about the US National Security Agency's PRISM electronic intelligence-gathering programme. After Snowden, it's a new digital world.

"We're now carrying our information to our allies on foot," said Peter Henzler, vice- president of the Bundeskriminalamt, known as the BKA. He was speaking recently at a German Interior Ministry discussion on the country's digital future. The focus of the panel was how to counter US surveillance measures and what it will take for Germans to be safe again on the web. "We're no longer using the open internet," he said.

The message is clear: No longer can the US be trusted to honour the privacy of German life and policy.

Henzler's concerns weren't isolated. The worries appear to reflect the wider German, and even European, frustration with the reach of the NSA's surveillance programme.

Hardly a week passes in Berlin without some new revelation about the dastardly depths to which the American spy programme invaded German privacy, or at least a new way in which to react to the scandal.