Skype makes chats and user data more available to police

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Thu Jul 26 09:15:05 PDT 2012


http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/skype-makes-chats-and-user-data-more-available-to-police/2012/07/25/gJQAobI39W_print.html

Skype makes chats and user data more available to police

By Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima,

Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents,
criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments,
has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online
chats and other user information available to police, said industry and
government officials familiar with the changes.

Surveillance of the audio and video feeds remains impractical b even when
courts issue warrants, say industry officials with direct knowledge of the
matter. But that barrier could eventually vanish as Skype becomes one of the
worldbs most popular forms of telecommunication.

The changes to online chats, which are written messages conveyed almost
instantaneously between users, result in part from technical upgrades to
Skype that were instituted to address outages and other stability issues
since Microsoft bought the company last year. Officials of the United States
and other countries have long pushed to expand their access to newer forms of
communications to resolve an issue that the FBI calls the bgoing darkb
problem.

Microsoft has approached the issue with btremendous sensitivity and a canny
awareness of what the issues would be,b said an industry official familiar
with Microsoftbs plans, who like several people interviewed for this story
spoke on the condition of anonymity because they werenbt authorized to
discuss the issue publicly. The company has ba long track record of working
successfully with law enforcement here and internationally,b he added.

The changes, which give the authorities access to addresses and credit card
numbers, have drawn quiet applause in law enforcement circles but hostility
from many activists and analysts.

Authorities had for years complained that Skypebs encryption and other
features made tracking drug lords, pedophiles and terrorists more difficult.
Jihadis recommended the service on online forums. Police listening to
traditional wiretaps occasionally would hear wary suspects say to one
another, bHey, letbs talk on Skype.b

Hacker groups and privacy experts have been speculating for months that Skype
had changed its architecture to make it easier for governments to monitor,
and many blamed Microsoft, which has an elaborate operation for complying
with legal government requests in countries around the world.

bThe issue is, to what extent are our communications being purpose-built to
make surveillance easy?b said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for
Internet Responsibility, a digital privacy group. bWhen you make it easy to
do, law enforcement is going to want to use it more and more. If you build
it, they will come.bb

Skype was slow to clarify the situation, issuing a statement recently that
said, bAs was true before the Microsoft acquisition, Skype cooperates with
law enforcement agencies as is legally required and technically feasible.b

But changes allowing police surveillance of online chats had been made since
late last year, a knowledgeable industry official said Wednesday.

In the United States, such requests require a court order, though in other
nations rules vary. Skype has more than 600 million users, with some in
nearly every nation in the world. Political dissidents relied on it
extensively during the Arab Spring to communicate with journalists, human
rights workers and each other, in part because of its reputation for
security.

Skypebs resistance to government monitoring, part of the company ethos when
European engineers founded it in 2003, resulted from both uncommonly strong
encryption and a key technical feature: Skype calls connected computers
directly rather than routing data through central servers, as many other
Internet-based communication systems do. That makes it more difficult for law
enforcement to intercept the call. The authorities long have been able to
wiretap Skype calls to traditional phones.

The company created a law-enforcement compliance team not long after eBay
bought the company in 2005, putting it squarely under the auspices of U.S.
law. The company was later sold to private investors before Microsoft bought
it in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.

The new ownership had at least an indirect role in the security changes.
Skype has endured periodic outages, including a disastrous one in December
2010. Company officials concluded that a more robust system was needed if the
company was going to reach its potential.

Industry officials said the resulting push for the creation of so-called
bsupernodes,b which routed some data through centralized servers, made
greater cooperation with law enforcement authorities possible.

The access to personal information and online chats, which are kept in
Skypebs systems for 30 days, remains short of what some law enforcement
officials have requested.

The FBI, whose officials have complained to Congress about the bgoing darkb
problem, issued a statement Wednesday night saying it couldnbt comment on a
particular company or service but that surveillance of conversations
brequires review and approval by a court. It is used only in national
security matters and to combat the most serious crimes.b

Hackers in recent years have demonstrated that it was possible to penetrate
Skype, but itbs not clear how often this happened. Microsoft won a patent in
June 2011 for blegal interceptb of Skype and similar Internet-based voice and
video systems. It is also possible, experts say, to monitor Skype chats as
well as voice and video by hacking into a userbs computer, doing an end run
around encryptions.

bIf someone wants to compromise a Skype communication, all they have to do is
hack the endpoint b the personbs computer or tablet or mobile phone, which is
very easy to do,b said Tom Kellermann, vice president of cybersecurity for
Trend Micro, a cloud security company.

Some industry officials, however, say Skype loses some competitive edge in
the increasingly crowded world of Internet-based communications systems if
users no longer see it as more private than rival services.

bThis is just making Skype like every other communication service, no better,
no worse,b said one industry official, speaking on the condition of
anonymity. bSkype used to be very special because it really was locked up.
Now itbs like Superman without his powers.b





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