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The announcement comes after reports this week that Verizon and British company Colt provide Internet services to the German parliament and other official entities.

Germany should've learned their lesson, when a telegram sent to their Ambassador in Mexico [wikipedia.org] was intercepted by the British — and shared with the US-government.

Had we not obtained that piece of intelligence, the history of the world could've been quite different...

the low tech solution? login. I only see slashdot classic. the conversation view is better, it is easier to follow long threads. The best part? Slashdot classic allows you to login once and keeps you logged in. Mobile and Beta slashdot log me out of the system after every post, If I can login at all.

One would think Slashdot would have tested user logins without someone like 1password or apple keychain providing login every time.

Yea, you should probably traceroute a few more things before making that claim. Teksavvy buys a lot of bandwidth from the US: http://fixedorbit.com/AS/5/AS5645.htm
Many routes to europe or asia will take US carriers unfortunately.

Just because none of the routers on the traceroute is in the US, doesn't mean the routing doesn't go THROUGH the US.
http://cablemap.info/

Please correct me if i'm wrong.

This story has close to none coverage in Germany.

It's been dug up by a blogger (1) and reblogged by netzpolitik.org (2), who then started to ask questions.

There are some articles gathering up by now, but the big media seems to shush things.
The leading tv-stations (ARD & ZDF) that are publicly funded have no real content regarding this story.
This being said: ZDF does list a story in which the government looks as if it has addressed this problem entirely by itself. Some reuters-bot-written junk. (3)

But this was not the case, the government clearly had no intention to reveal it's ties to Verizon. If it wasn't for the blogger, they wouldn't have had to.
Now they're trying to downplay the story and to make the provided services look like a fallback routine or - even better - like an unused source.

The Fed. Ministry of Interior posted yesterday that it had contacted Verizon in 2010,
telling them they would slowly withdraw from the contract, since the Verizon services were being replaced gradually by a new infrastructure for the Government. (4) ...they forgot to tell us when this would happen, but now it seems like they are ready for the big transition m(

After the internet died last summer, this is a bad joke.

Anyhow:
also yesterday the big coalition has managed to finalize their decision regarding a hearing of E. Snowden.
They hold a majority within the exclusivly formed task force regarding the NSA affair.
They have decided mutually that a hearing can not take place on German soil - given the 'fact' that an extradition treaty with the US is in effect. (5)

1: Daniel Luecking http://medienkonsument.de/
2: https://netzpolitik.org/2014/arbeitserleichterung-fuer-die-nsa-deutscher-bundestag-bezieht-internet-von-us-anbieter-verizon/
3: http://www.heute.de/bund-baut-kommunikationsnetz-neu-ohne-us-partner-verizon-33792814.html
4: https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/DE/2014/06/bund-wechselt-netzbetreiber.html
5: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/nsa-affaere-grosse-koalition-verhindert-befragung-von-snowden-a-977742.html