Patrick McDermott

On Sunday it was revealed that the NSA, forbidden by President Obama from tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone directly, has ramped up its spying on her senior government officials, according to the German Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag. The paper said that the information's source is an anonymous, high-ranking NSA official stationed in Germany.

In October, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the US had been spying on Chancellor Merkel for years, tapping her phone and the phones of 34 other world leaders. The sources of the fall accusations were damning, and they led one German politician to call for a complete halt to trade negotiations between the European Union and the US. In January, President Obama ordered the NSA to stop spying on the leaders of US-allied nations.

Still, that moratorium on spying didn't extend beyond those world leaders, and Reuters, translating from the BamS source, writes that the source said, “We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly.” Specifically, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, one of Merkel's confidants, was called out as being a target of the NSA's increased spying efforts.

Great Beyond

Long-running disputes involving Verizon, Netflix, and Internet bandwidth providers are flaring up, causing recent slowdowns in Netflix speed.

According to a Wall Street Journal report tonight, "[t]he online-video service has been at odds with Verizon Communications Inc. and other broadband providers for months over how much Netflix streaming content they will carry without being paid additional fees. Now the long simmering conflict has heated up and is slowing Netflix, in particular, on Verizon's fiber-optic FiOS service, where Netflix says its average prime-time speeds dropped by 14 percent last month."One possible interpretation of the above statement is that Verizon has been demanding direct payments from Netflix in exchange for carrying any video traffic beyond some numerical limit. That's probably not precisely what's happening, however, because the report says this particular dispute has been simmering for months—meaning it started before the court decision last month that overturned the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules. Prior to that court decision, it would not have been legal for Verizon to refuse to carry Netflix traffic when its payment demands weren't met.

However, there are other ways Verizon can play hardball and affect Netflix performance. Netflix has been pushing ISPs to host its caching equipment within their data centers and to peer directly with the video provider—that is, exchange traffic without a third-party intermediary.