Monitored Alarm Systems

In recent days was a sort of storm of people who say that Skype was to let the police hear your calls. We were among those who said that Skype was, at least, is unwilling to make clear statements about whether the service could be a wire tapped. Skype to Skype is a direct person to person connection (rather than a central server), most people were not particularly thought thread. It's not entirely true. And of course, the use of Skype as part of a phone call or a telephone line, the calls would be to tap into traditional telephone wiretapping.



The "Skype can allow police to listen to the calls of their" furor took off within days. The Washington Post reported that Skype has been making it easier law enforcement to get the chat text and user data. It's not really clear that this is true if (but more on that later). Then kick into high gear when Eric Jackson at Forbes ( which we wrote about before taking strangely uninformed about the fight patent Yahoo / Facebook and those who reported on him) wrote a post saying that Microsoft ridiculously ignorant can listen to all your Skype calls, based on a misunderstanding of incredible denial of the original publication of Skype to comment directly on the skills of the wiretap.

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Jackson sensible fellow, Kash Hill, back in the claims of Jackson, but also noted that the law (United States) is quite clear that there Microsoft has no legal obligation to use Skype ... but there have been regular efforts made to change this situation. Hill spoke the lawyer Jennifer Granick, who noted that only the uncertainty and the threat that this legislation could go down the road once seemed to lead to development decisions left open the possibility of monitoring:

The mere threat of regulation is driving innovation in the direction of the rear doors and compliance monitoring. And the law of the United States does not, however.

But what is really happening, and that much of what appears to be conjecture and speculation? Well, as the attention and the issues, weighed Skype to "clarify". He said he was the installation of more in-house "supernodes" (in the more distant past, many Skype users who act as supernodes) to improve the quality of the repertoire - but Skype to Skype calls ( once again, calls not touch the public telephone network) were still encrypted from one person to the call of the person:

The movement in the home of "supernodes" do not establish a control or call log. "Supernodes" Skype help customers to locate each other so that Skype calls can be made. In short, the great act as a distributed directory of Skype users. Skype to Skype calls do not pass through our data centers and "supernodes" are not involved, by the way, the. Media (audio or video) between users of Skype

These calls are established directly between the participating nodes in Skype (customers). In some cases, Skype has added servers to help set up calls, operation or maintenance, for example, a server is used to notify a customer that a new call and begins the Skype application n is not complete is running (for example, the device is suspended, sleep or requires notification of the incoming call), or in a group video call, where a server aggregates the media stream (video) multiple clients and roads from east to customers who otherwise might not have enough bandwidth to make connections to all participants.

• [....] The Skype software is applied regardless of encryption of Skype to Skype calls between computers, smart phones and other mobile devices with the possibility A complete version of Skype software has always done. This has not changed.
• But ... there are still reasons to be a little (not hysterical) question? Perhaps. Chris Soghoian has the best job by far, in what is known and what is unknown, which explains how one person to another Skype encryption can not be so totally untappable as some suppose. He emphasizes that while Skype to Skype is encrypted, Skype has access to the encryption key (which has a full explanation of how / why), and then explains what this probably means:
• Ok, so Skype has access to encryption keys and user communications (or you can allow other users to upgrade to Skype). What does this mean for the confidentiality of Skype calls? Skype may actually be telling the truth when he told reporters that do not provide CALEA-style wiretapping capabilities to governments. You may not need. If governments can intercept and record users of encrypted communications (with the assistance provided by Internet service providers), and the encryption keys used by both ends of the conversation or you can go with Skype and to human attacks in the middle of their conversation, then you can decrypt the voice communication without any additional help from Skype.

So there is a risk there, and Soghoian notes that the reluctance of Skype to get things exactly the way it handles the encoding leaves open the possibility. It is very possible that he is not
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so that police can intercept Skype calls, Skype, while you can still talk of encryption, leaving the false impression that calls are secure from interception. Soghoian also points out that to speak of Skype through information delivery (no call) access to law enforcement is not new and has been known for some time (and, honestly, does not seem not very different from many other similar configurations.) infrastructure made some changes recently, which increased the number of self-organized supernodes, but these changes are likely to increase product quality, and had little to do with the setting implementation of the law / monitoring.

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