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BERLIN. — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has embraced proposals to create European data networks that would keep e-mails and other communications on the European side of the Atlantic, farther from prying American eyes, and said she would raise the matter this week with President François Hollande of France.

“We will, above all, discuss which European providers we have who offer security for our citizens,” Ms Merkel said on Saturday in her weekly podcast.

“So that you don’t have to go across the Atlantic with e-mails and other things, but can build up communications networks also within Europe.”

The two leaders are to meet tomorrow in Paris, where Ms Merkel will also speak on unspecified economic matters, her spokesman said.
The Indonesian Embassy in Washington, left, and the building where Mayer Brown has an office. Indonesia retained the American law firm for help in trade talks.

German companies like Deutsche Telekom have already aired the possibility of creating such networks as a way to allay public fears about data sent over the Internet being scanned and collected by the National Security Agency when it passes through servers in the United States or those belonging to American companies.

But this was the first time that Merkel had publicly embraced the proposal.
The chancellor, who was raised in Communist East Germany, where the government regularly spied on its citizens, publicly vented at being monitored when it was discovered last fall that her cellphone had most likely been tapped by the American intelligence agency.

The affair, brought to light when the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked agency documents, continues to rile particularly the political and media elite, which are stunned that the Americans who taught post-Nazi Germans the meaning of privacy and freedom of the individual are collecting private data on such a scale.

President Obama has promised Merkel that her phone is no longer monitored. But a German newspaper revealed recently that the phone of her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, apparently was monitored in 2002, when he opposed the Bush administration’s plans to go to war in Iraq.  —New York Times.