Call Me! A German Satellite And Internet Company Wants Answers From The NSA

The small-scale Stellar communications company in Germany is reeling from revelations that it may have been hacked by GCHQ and the NSA. DW travels to the sleepy town of Hürth to try and find out why.



Christian Steffen was next in line at an automated car wash in Hürth, Germany, when he received a call from the weekly magazine, "Der Spiegel." Over the next 30 minutes he was informed that, according to documents seen by the magazine, his satellite communications company, Stellar GmbH, had been hacked by a joint GCHQ/NSA electronic monitoring program, along with two other German firms operating similar businesses.



"The name Snowden wasn't mentioned," says Steffen. "But I could put [two and two] together. Actually, they said it related to the Bics, to the Belgacom case."



The Belgacom case had been leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and was publicized by "Der Spiegel" in September 2013.



It involved GCHQ's monitoring of Belgium's partially state-owned Belgacom company, and its subsidiary, Bics, a joint venture with Swisscom and MTN of South Africa.



Belgacom was at that time a Stellar customer.



When Steffen was informed of his own company's surveillance, he was asked to refrain from publicizing the information.



But that morning he convened his staff of 28 in Hürth.



The extent of the hack was unclear, he told them, but since the Belgacom case had involved fake LinkedIn profiles, he asked that, at the very least, they avoid the professional social network.



"If you ask me whether I'm absolutely sure that they are not in our network, I cannot give you any guarantees," he says.



Economic espionage?



Outside, 70 antennae do the company's chief business: beaming data to and receiving data from any part of the world that's un-tethered from the global fiber optic network.



In communications jargon it's called "teleporting."







"We are one of the providers for Deutsche Lufthansa, for example," says Steffen. "They don't know that we do that. But we are behind the scenes in providing Internet into the aircraft for Lufthansa, for example."



His second example requires disclosure: Stellar beams