Skype Encryption Stumps German Police

TallGuyRacer writes "German police are unable to decipher the encryption used in the internet telephone software Skype to monitor calls by suspected criminals and terrorists, Germany's top police officer, Joerg Ziercke, said. "The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted.""

Comments

Skype unbreakable?

[niceone]

Well, it seems they are not really trying - they are not even talking to Skype about it.
What they want is permission to install spyware - something that is illegal in Germany at the moment:

Ziercke said there was a vital need for German law enforcement agencies to have the ability to conduct on-line searches of computer hard drives of suspected terrorists using "Trojan horse" spyware.

That's the real point of the story, not that Skype is unbreakable.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Silver Sloth]

Indeed. Also from TFA

Spyware computer searches are illegal in Germany, where people are sensitive about police surveillance due to the history of the Nazis' Gestapo secret police and the former East German Stasi. I would hope that they are illegal in any civilised country.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Slashidiot]

Yes, feels like not being able to eavesdrop Skype conversations is just an excuse to get spyware on people's computer. I'm OK with the police doing that, IF a judge decides there is some kind of spyware warrant for that particular person on that particular time.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[GroeFaZ]

Exactly. The Anti-terror craze has long reached German lawmakers, and they are in a rage creating law after law (though not as bad as in the US and UK) and seeing what survives the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the court that decides if laws are against the German Grundgesetz (Basic Law, comparable to the US Constitution).

In the case of the "Federal Trojan", it was decided in 02/07 that such measures are illegal to conduct, and decisions made by the Bundesverfassungsgericht are equivalent to laws. So what they're doing now, they're keeping the discussion (and the fear-mongering) alive and continue to develop the trojan despite it being illegal, in an effort to undermine that decision. Most notorious for this behaviour is, of all people, our Minister of Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. He repeatedly clamored and still clamors for this and other measures which are explicitely forbidden by the Grundgesetz and the Bundesverfassungsgericht, for example shooting down abducted planes. He's one of the single largest threats to what he has to protect by job description, namely the Grundgesetz.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[OrangeTide]

Governments often tell us that there is some threat that they want to protect us from, and if we just give up a little bit of our freedom they will make society much safer. We fall for this trick over and over again.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[oliverthered]

As a good example,
The US managed to get the UK to agree to deport anyone they asked for in case they were terrorists.

The first people the chose to ask to be deported were a bunch of bankers that had done some dodgy dealings, hardly terrorists.

And what's worse/better is that the US didn't hold up to it's part of the bargain and sign up to a similar agreement.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[BobTheLawyer]

Why? If the police can, in extreme situations, apply to a court for a warrant to search a suspect's house, open their mail or tap their phone - and the US and almost every other country allows this - why shouldn't they be able to search a suspect's computer?

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Obsi]

You misquote it. It's "Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Scarblac]

Well, what if it DOES make society safer?

I'd say that right now, society is plenty safe enough, but our privacy isn't strict enough. Time to make errors in the direction of privacy for a while.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[bug1]

Well, what if it DOES make society safer?
Safer for society as a whole, or safer for the elites ?

is there a balance of some sort to be found?
A perception of balance... balance according to which perspective ?

What's a good place to draw the line?
Does there have to be a "line", can freedom vs security be seen in black and white ?

People always repeat the "he who sacrifices liberty for security..." line, but what would a better solution be?
Those with power will always say they need more of it, how can those with power be prevented from abusing it ?

Zero policing?
Is there any point having laws if they aren't enforced ?

No laws?
If there were no state imposed laws would human behaviour still be government by morality/ethics, are they laws ?

Absolute freedom?
Is freedom a state of mind ?

Would that mean complete chaos and anarchy, and if so, is the freedom still worth it?
Does anarchy imply chaos, or just a lack of authority ?
Do humans have the ability to abandon all order ?
How would you describe chaos in a society ?
Is freedom an abstract concept, if so, on what terms do you value it ?

Why?
I could answer that, but i have to go.

I look forward to rexchanging opinions again in the future.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[vrai]

And what's worse/better is that the US didn't hold up to it's part of the bargain and sign up to a similar agreement.

Not that I'm defending this treaty in anyway, nor the period during which it was unilateral, but the US Senate signed off on it last year. Apparently the Senate was concerned that the UK might use the treaty to extradite IRA members who had fled to the US and that would apparently be a bad thing.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[TheRaven64]

It seems to me that, even if it were legal, it would be very hard to admit as evidence in court. If a computer is compromised then the defendant has a good defence against being responsible for anything found or done with the computer. The hard part, usually, is proving that the computer was compromised. If the prosecution are claiming that they are the ones that compromised it then there is no way a decent barrister would fail to convince the jury that their client had absolutely no responsibility for anything done to the computer.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[ewn]

Well they can already do that now, for example by installing microphones in suspect's homes, but it requires a court warrant and a considerable amount of work. The Bundestrojaner would make snooping simpler, both in technical and in legal terms. And we know that if technology is cheap and simple, it's going to be used more. That is, i think, the government's goal here: gaining the ability to infiltrate a large number of computers, say of a significant percentage of Muslim citizens, or the globalization sceptics of Attac, or any other group that potentially features undesirable behaviour. No court would ever allow such a sweeping surveillance, and the police doesn't have the resources to bug thousands of homes anyway.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the Senate was concerned that the UK might use the treaty to extradite IRA members who had fled to the US and that would apparently be a bad thing.

So the US government supports terrorism. Presumably only if it is done by white people with cute accents.

The US people also supported terrorism back in the day (well, those that claim to be Irish), before they understood the actual reality of terrorism.

I doubt the UK government would want to get into the hassle that extraditing any such people would inevitably lead to of course, but if the US is harbouring and protecting terrorists willingly then it really needs to sort out what its story is regarding terrorism.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[presarioD]

Well, what if it DOES make society safer?

History has repeatedly proven that when a government asks its citizens to give up liberties it is working against making society safer but more absolute and submissive. Can you provide with any example where people who gave up their freedoms became safer? I can cite alot of counterexamples: nazi/fascist/communist governments that miserably failed in all fronts, including safety (the state safety-keeping apparatus turned against the citizens). Now neo-capitalism wants to join the club and they are going to be different exactly why?

Please don't use the words "democracy and freedom" in your answer, I've just eaten...

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they should ask the guys at Bletchley Park if they can borrow Colossus?

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Sique]

There is a big difference between tapping a phone or a search warrant on the one side and a secret search of one's computer.

For a search warrant to be executed the suspect has to be present, or at least an outside witness has to be present. (I don't know about the legal situation in the U.S., but at least in Germany this is the case.)

Phone tapping can't create phone conversations that never happened.

But if you can install a software on a person's computer without him noticing, then you could also put counterbande files like the oh so beloved bomb construction howtos or kiddie porn on the computer.

The main problem with secretly spying on a computer is that it compromises the computer. From a legal point of view material gained with a secret computer search shouldn't be brought to court, because there is no way to prove that the evidence isn't faked.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[nyekulturniy]

I think that comment is too broad reaching. Specifically, the senators from New York and Massachusetts, where the Irish-American political influence is strongest, opposed this extradition treaty. The rest of the country didn't care, but it was never high on the U.S. priorities.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

While your post certainly makes sense, I simply cannot take serious anyone who uses "GröFaZ" as a nickname.

(Note to Slashdot moderators: "GröFaZ" is a cryptonym of sorts for Adolf Hitler that (neo-)nazis use in order to be able to talk about him without everyone immediately realising who they're referring to.)

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Yokaze]

In Germany, secret searches of homes are prohibited. IRC, they have to happen in the presence of a member the household, or a neighbour. The telephone, mail and internet communication are not part of the home, and can be secretly monitored under the observation of a judge. The suspect has to be informed afterwards. The home enjoys a much stronger constitutional protection than communication.

Of course, the ministry of interior and the police argue, that they can't stop the terrorists, if they can't secretly hack the computer and monitor their communication.
And of course, it will only be used for severe crimes. Normal people have nothing to fear.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[bhima]

I've thought about this idea that the Bundestrojaner would make snooping cheaper and easier. I think it would have another effect: About 15 minutes after they let the first one out into the wild some teenager in Slovenia would publish a CLI app that would detect and disable it or alternately hijack the app to share the contents of the drive on whatever P2P app Slovenian teenagers are into this week. Then everyone who *really* had a reason to make sure they were not infected would have this app and only the average Joe would be out there sharing his hard drive contents with the world.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

The term GröFaZ was *not* something you wanted to be caught using when the Nazis were in power. It is a (disrespectful) abbreviation of 'Größte Führer aller Zeiten' (Greatest leader of all times) which was what the Nazi party propaganda machinery used to call their big boss.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[bug1]

You know, this almost sounds like a troll. Well, I'm taking the bait. I hope it turns into an actual discussion.

In your first post you were being indirect by responding with questions, so i did the same to try and make a point.

It was a bit of a troll.... nothing personal.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Sique]

I like the old calculation we had in statistics:

- There is a severe sickness, which only one of 100,000 people gets.
- There is a test for this sickness, which is 99,9% accurate, that means, that the result of only 1 in 1000 persons is wrong. (In reality you have two numbers, one giving how high the rate is to give a false positive, and another one for the false negatives, but for the sake of the calculation we consider them equal).

How high is the chance, after you got tested positive, that you in fact have the severe sickness?

In 99 out of 100 this was a false positive.

The same goes for the search of terrorists.

Terrorists are very seldom, lets say that only 1 in 100,000 persons in Germany is a terrorist (this still gives 800 terrorists living in Germany, far too much compared with the number of terroristic acts committed!). Lets say that the police has means to be 99,9% accurate to tell beforehand if a suspect is a terrorist or not, before asking for secret computer searches.

It still means that in 99 out of 100 cases a complete innocent person's computer will be searched.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[risk one]

It also shows what happens in situations like these. Right now, the German police can tap anybody's phonecall, except that of terrorists. If they get their trojans (god forbid), the terrorists will switch to encrypted drives under an obscure operating system with their own voip network over tor. And again, the regular folk that don't care enough to set all that up get spied on for downloading mp3's and the terrorists that mean business evade the police with minimal effort.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Back in the days of Ronnie R, the governments of Mozambique and Angola were:
a) - Communist (they may be still be)
b) - Neighbours of South Africa and supporting the ANC against the Apartheid S African government.
c) - Opposed by S African-sponsored rebel organisations (S Africa was trying to destabilise the opposition).

Both rebel organisations fit pretty much any definition of 'Terrorist' you can come up with. The US under Reagan helped finance both sets of terrorists in the name of opposing Communism.

The Contras in Nicaragua were almost as bad and they were pretty much a creation of the US.

The Taliban were also US sponsored (via Pakistan) for a while, at this point the line between terrorist and freedom fighter becomes blurred. That particular turkey has come home to roost.

Now going back to the actual article here:
Experts say Skype and other Voice over internet Protocol (VoIP) calling software are difficult to intercept because they work by breaking up voice data into small packets and switching them along thousands of router paths instead of a constant circuit between two parties, as with a traditional call.
If I was in Joerg Ziercke's position, I would probably announce that Skype's encryption was too strong once it had been cracked - to get the people you want to watch using Skype. Are the packets really sent along 'thousands of router paths'? Obviously the potential is there but I normally expect most of the packets to take the same route.
A few years ago it was announced that digital mobile phones could not be overheard, I wonder if that still applies.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[ethanhunt123]

Not only white people with fake accents. But also any Islamic terrorists who dont attack US directly and are supported by supposedly pro-US regimes (islamic terrorists in India supported by Pakistan and Musharraf). Also, it supports state sponsored terrorism if the state is in alliance with US (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, formerly Chile etc etc)

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[rbanffy]

"So the US government supports terrorism"

No. No... You got it wrong... They are freedom fighters.

See the difference?

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

From a legal point of view material gained with a secret computer search shouldn't be brought to court, because there is no way to prove that the evidence isn't faked.

By that argument, eyewitness testimony should also be illegal, because there's no way to prove that the witnesses aren't committing perjury.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Dogtanian]

I think that comment is too broad reaching. Specifically, the senators from New York and Massachusetts, where the Irish-American political influence is strongest, opposed this extradition treaty. That's the ultimate hypocritical irony. You'd think that New Yorkers would be less inclined to support terrorists after 9/11, but it looks like the old double standard is still in place. Or at least if there are a few votes in it.

The rest of the country didn't care, but it was never high on the U.S. priorities. They probably didn't care because the UK had already enacted its side of the bargain. Frankly, the UK government should have shoved this alleged agreement to the bottom of the pile until the US stopped trying to appease a (supposedly) tiny minority of sentimentalist fuckwits.

And frankly, if the rest of the country didn't care about this anti/pro-terrorism double standard and blocking their side of a bargain that was supposed to be in their interest, then they're just as guilty.

Can you imagine what would have happened if- during the 1980s- an organisation had tried to kill senior members of the U.S. government, including the president, and had come damn close to succeeding? And the UK had continued to allow fundraising for this organisation? That's exactly what happened in reverse with the IRA, and it defies belief that there was so little diplomatic fall-out- and it's also damn obvious that if the Americans were victims this would never happen in reverse.

And years later, when it's the US's turn to suffer the effects of terrorism, and the sycophantic UK government led by that contemptible poodle, Tony Blair, is going along with virtually *everything* their government wants, the US is still letting a bunch of sentimentalist IRA-sympathising scum and hypocritical vote-seeking senators dictate the same old double standards?

Seriously, this is beneath contempt.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[ReeceTarbert]

apply to a court for a warrant

You've just answered the question yourself: without a search warrant, the scope for abuse is immense.

Of course there are the usual, broad categories (terrorist, pedophiles, criminals, etc.) that make it sound as the sensible thing to do, but once you grant such sweeping powers, what's preventing the police to use them to spy on political opponents, activists, or anyone else who just happens to "think different"?

RT
--
Your Bookmarks. Anywhere. Anytime.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

The idea of compromised is a subjective term in most situations. When the Government or police do it, it is a tool, when credit card number spamer is doing it, it is compromised.

You see, the idea behind the compromised portion deals a lot with the intent of who compromised it. Compromised means that you don't know their intent, what they have done and cannot trust the computer for anything. This wouldn't necessarily be the case when the police do it. At least not in the virgin eyes of the courts who still believe the police wouldn't act in an unlawful manor.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[nEJC76]

I don't think Slovenia is a good example country...
there are no decent hax0rz here, just script-kiddies... and what they do best is script-hack 127.0.0.1

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[cheater512]

Thats absolutely fine.

However why do they need a trojan horse to search the computer when they have a warrant which gives them physical access to the computer?

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Tom]

Mod parent up. That's exactly what's going on. Right now the probably mentally unstable (and I actually do mean that in a medical sense, google a bit and you'll find many articles about the fact) minister Schäuble is trying to force through the absurd idea of "online computer searches", or in other words: Installing a trojan everywhere, in his ongoing crusade for pseudo-security.

This is just one more "we really need this, look how desperate we are" PR stunt.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US there has been talk of making eyewitness testimony inadmissible in court because of it's unreliability, esepcially after a few days.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[bluefoxlucid]

Please explain the math here, because your results indicate the test is 99% inaccurate (which indicates someone doesn't know wtf they're doing; if the test is consistently wrong, invert the results).

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

You cannot simplify this the way you are attempting to do. The IRA was a revolutionary army and Ireland was a quasi civil war. From the ancient times, they have been attempting to expel the English invaders.

So this isn't really a situation where terrorist were attacking england as much as it was a situation where a revolution was attempting to happen and they resorted to terrorist actions. Quit the bit of difference there. Now, I'm not saying the US was right or wrong in their actions or inactions, I'm saying that it isn't as plain as you make it out. It you were on the other side, you would be calling the British terrorist because of how they gunned down resistance members for no reason and so on.

There is no hypocrisies in it at all. Simply because you cannot directly relate the two situations. It just isn't that simple.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Potor]

Perhaps they are really saying: "Hey criminals - we can't listen to you on Skype. Really. So be sure to use Skype. Because we can't listen to you. Really. So Skype is safe for you to use since we can't listen to you. Feel free to discuss your criminal plans in full detail on Skype, because we can't listen to you. Really."

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

Did you read some book called all you need to know to trash the US in 60 minutes or less?

First, Civil wars are wars, even when they contain acts of terrorist. So it isn't really the same situation as supporting terrorist.

Second, the Taliban wasn't funded by the US at all. They weren't even formed as an organization until after Russia started pulling out of Afghanistan. Granted their members were part of the mujahideen but references to them before the Russian occupation ended actually is referencing "religious students" which is what taliban means. Around 1994m the taliban of Kandahar ended up organizing the other "religious student" in a movement that created the taliban we know and love. There is a lot more to it but that is the gist. We did not fund the taliban but we might have funded people who would hav later become members of the taliban.

Now, I agree with the final parts of your comment. More specifically, if the government was listening or monitoring the packets at the first switch or router position (from an ISP level), it wouldn't matter what path they took, because it would need to pass through there in order to goto the other nodes.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Myopic]

The CIA has been spying on its fellow Americans for fifty years, during which America has experienced significant domestic tranquility. Using those techniques they broke up both the KKK and Black Panthers.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[jeti]

There is a petition against the Vorratsdatenspeicherung with an unusual amount of signatures. Wolgang Schäuble called it "größte Verfassungsbeschwerde aller Zeiten" (greatest petition of all times) in allusion to the term "größter Feldherr aller Zeiten - GröFaZ" (greatest leader of all times). Schäuble has received more criticism for this pun than for all the outrageous and unconstitutional ideas he presented (like killing suspected terrorists without a trial). I can only presume that the nick is an allusion to this incident.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[ILuvRamen]

What they want is permission to install spyware - something that is illegal in Germany at the moment:

No, they're obviously referring to wiretapping your microphone line leading to the computer lol. I think I'd notice if they did that though.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[TheRaven64]

Oh, I'm sure the court trust the police implicitly. They would still need to prove, however, that the exploit that they installed could not have been used by a malicious third party.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Sique]

That's why a single statement from a single eyewitness is traditionally not enough to prove someones guilt.

Even the Romans demanded at least three eyewitnesses before court.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Mark J Tilford]

There are two different questions:

- If the person is sick, what is the chance that the test will give a sick result? (99.9 %)
- If the test gives a sick result, what is the chance the person is sick? (1 %)

And you can't invert the result; if it gives a healthy result, the person is almost certainly healthy.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Sique]

It's simple math.

If you randomly test 100000 people, only one of them will have the sickness. 99999 are healthy. Of those 99 will be tested positive because one out of 1000 will falsely be tested positive.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[vegiVamp]

> it was decided in 02/07

Slightly OT, but as your neighbour (.be), this is of some interest to me as well, so are you using English or normal dates (i.e. did you mean 2/2007 or 7/2002) ?

(One would think y2k taught us nothing :-p )

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[FinchWorld]

Really? Mostly to me the story looks like "Actually, we have cracked the skype encryption, but say we'll the opposite in hope that the bad guys believe us and start using it..."

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[aztektum]

Gesundheit

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[mpe]

In the case of the "Federal Trojan", it was decided in 02/07 that such measures are illegal to conduct, and decisions made by the Bundesverfassungsgericht are equivalent to laws. So what they're doing now, they're keeping the discussion (and the fear-mongering) alive and continue to develop the trojan despite it being illegal, in an effort to undermine that decision. Most notorious for this behaviour is, of all people, our Minister of Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. He repeatedly clamored and still clamors for this and other measures which are explicitely forbidden by the Grundgesetz and the Bundesverfassungsgericht, for example shooting down abducted planes. He's one of the single largest threats to what he has to protect by job description, namely the Grundgesetz.

Does German law have the concept of "high treason"?

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Soruk]

What do you mean, "English or normal dates"? Us English folk (in .uk) use DD/MM/(YY)YY. Did you mean to write "American or normal dates", since they use the curious MM/DD/(YY)YY format.

Either way, apart from the users of YYYY/MM/DD, 02/07 would mean February 2007 to most of us.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[mpe]

In Germany, secret searches of homes are prohibited. IRC, they have to happen in the presence of a member the household, or a neighbour. The telephone, mail and internet communication are not part of the home, and can be secretly monitored under the observation of a judge. The suspect has to be informed afterwards. The home enjoys a much stronger constitutional protection than communication.

Considering recent history you'd expect the average German to have little time for officials overstepping their bounds.

Of course, the ministry of interior and the police argue, that they can't stop the terrorists, if they can't secretly hack the computer and monitor their communication.

What they omit to say is that it wouldn't actually help much even if they were seriously interested in stopping terrorists who were dangerous to the public.

And of course, it will only be used for severe crimes. Normal people have nothing to fear.

Those claiming "Stasi 2.0" probably have the best grasp of history here.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[mpe]

Of course there are the usual, broad categories (terrorist, pedophiles, criminals, etc.) that make it sound as the sensible thing to do, but once you grant such sweeping powers, what's preventing the police to use them to spy on political opponents, activists, or anyone else who just happens to "think different"?

Also is the relationship between their usage with respect of these catagories likely to be "and", "or" or "xor". Historical precident tends towards "xor".

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[TooMuchToDo]

If the police can compromise a computer, then anyone else with the right tools can. Therefore, anything found on the computer should not be admissible as there's no way to verify who (myself, the police, or a remote malicious user) has manipulated the contents of the PC.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[mpe]

Governments often tell us that there is some threat that they want to protect us from, and if we just give up a little bit of our freedom they will make society much safer. We fall for this trick over and over again.

There's a couple of associated tricks. People who repeatedly lie gaining and maintaining trust. Together with the idea that if this protection "fails" then it must be because insufficent freedoms were transfered from the public to the state.
Maybe someone should make a documentry about this kind of thing with a catchy title like "The Power of Nightmares"...

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Laurence0]

Speaking /as/ an English person, 02/07 could only mean Feb 07, if one is known to be a year. The confusion arises with the UK using day/month(/year), and the US using month/day(/year). I feel our way makes more sense as you've got the three in ascending order. Of course, being a geek, I frequently use year/month/day as it can be easily sorted.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[mpe]

Apparently the Senate was concerned that the UK might use the treaty to extradite IRA members who had fled to the US and that would apparently be a bad thing.

They were concerned that a treaty which was publically claimed to be about extraditing terrorists might be used to extradite terrorists... Slashdot really needs a moderation for "ironic".

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[mpe]

So the US government supports terrorism.

IIRC the US is one of only two UN member states who refuses to condem state sponsorship of terrorism (the other one being somewhere in Asia).

Presumably only if it is done by white people with cute accents.

Not unless you consider Central and South America to be inhabited by "white people with cute accents".

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Kjella]

The main problem with secretly spying on a computer is that it compromises the computer. From a legal point of view material gained with a secret computer search shouldn't be brought to court, because there is no way to prove that the evidence isn't faked. I'm sorry but there are no absolute truths, evidence can always be faked and witnesses can always lie. Unless you can create reasonable doubt about the evidence or the testimony, you lose. Consider the following: Your computer is seized the old fashioned way. Whoever does forensics copies over some kiddie porn, backdates the timestamp and then makes the supposedly pristine copy. Then they "find" it and throw you in jail. Just because you're able to come up with the story, doesn't make it reasonable doubt. I think it'll be the same if the police invaded your computer. Or that the police planted that kilo of drugs in your house. Or planted that gun. You can almost always claim the police is conspiring against you, I doubt it'll lead to anything without evidence.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Bright Apollo]

You have a limited understanding of how wiretapping works, then.

For anything being monitored, there has to be two criteria met: one, the complete function of your monitoring device and two, real-time audit of the results.

For s/w keyloggers and the like, you have to prove that it will only dump the intercepted signals to . You'd have to demonstrate that you could not inject a fake transcript of the purported interception.

Once you've done that, you have to monitor it and sign off on its use, i.e. "I monitored this conversation starting at 0344hrs UTC and ending at 0401hrs UTC, the details of which follow..." There would be at least two individuals monitoring the transmission and being forced to sign off on it. The alternative, in court, is a weakened prosecution because you cannot prove it was properly installed, worked according to its specifications, and was properly monitored.

As illustrated by others, you need to completely mitigate the defense arguments of digital mock-ups of evidence. Having 100% proof that traffic originated at the keyboard goes a long way.

-BA

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[mpe]

Well, what if it DOES make society safer?

Then you'd expect to find plenty of historical evidence to make the case. N.B. regardless of if you are killed by a terrorist bomb or guns fired by armed police you are equally dead.

Is it worth it -- is there a balance of some sort to be found?

In which case such a balance needs to be arrived at by rational thinking. The answer is certainly not "more power to the state, less power to the public".
An alternative approach would be to repeal some laws (especially one's which actually do more harm than good to society) so that the police can concentrate more of "terrorists". Possibly with increased oversight of the police to check that that they were actually doing this. Thus you have a possible way to make life more difficult for terrorists whilst increasing "civil liberties" and decreasing the power of the state.

People always repeat the "he who sacrifices liberty for security..." line, but what would a better solution be? Zero policing? No laws? Absolute freedom? Would that mean complete chaos and anarchy, and if so, is the freedom still worth it? Why?

This looks rather like the "fallacy of the excluded middle"...

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[corsec67]

Especially since the police hack could introduce other vulnerabilities into the system that makes it easier for other people to exploit.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater? The rights of states to secede from the Union? The right to own slaves? The right to marry multiple women? The right to fuck children? The right to freely use/purchase/sell heroin? The right to plot the assassination of the President of the Unites States? The right to kill for any arbitrary reason? The right to cross the highway on foot? The right to drive at whatever speed you feel like?

Under the US system of law, basically every law is a restriction on rights, and a great many of them make sense and are a necessary basis of a society.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

They would not have to prove as much as make an assurance. Me saying this program is not exploitable is true until someone finds an exploit. If there are known or unknown exploits, then yes, proof that no one manipulated the data would be needed.

Unfortunately, until you prove otherwise, if I say this program cannot be exploited, then it stands to that effect until it can be. Hence, no reason to distrust the data.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Kattspya]

From my WW-II books the term is Größte Feldherr aller Zeiten. As you say it was a disrespectful nickname for Hitler. If I remember correctly it's hinting to his meddling in his generals plans, mostly for the worse sometimes for the better.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Sancho]

They want to monitor future encrypted connections. That was the whole point--they can't break the encryption, so they want to install a trojan to send the plaintext before or after it is encrypted.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

When the tight tools means physical access to the machine or a direct connection through the ISP, then the likelihood of all else drops dramatically.

There is a possibility that everyone whoever has been arrested had been framed, but the likelihood is so small that not everyone claims it nor do others think it. IT would depends a lot on what steps needed to be taken and how likely someone else could take those steps. I could also be possible that the police end up seeing some other party putting the incriminating stuff onto your PC. But ultimately, it would/could be your defense that the computer was infected with something and you couldn't get rid of it. Or something similar to that. We have seen this in the past and it didn't fair to well, remember the schoolteacher who had pornographic popups due to malware on a presentation computer and ended up getting something like 40 years?

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[IkeTo]

> From a legal point of view material gained with a secret computer search shouldn't be brought to court,
> because there is no way to prove that the evidence isn't faked.

There are lots of activities done by the police which is exactly like that: they know it is impossible to put the direct result to court as evidence for whatever reason ("the court know the police can fake it" is about the most minor one...), but the police would do it anyway. Reason? If they can tap into their suspect and as a result know something would happen in "real life" rather than electronically, they can organize an operation, and the result of that operation can be put to court. No court will be dissatisfied if the operation is done in response to some "undisclosed insiders' information".

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's it

mark one from a berlin student

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Mattsson]

It's rather obvious that what you regarded as terrorism depends on who you are.
There isn't many who see themselves as evil terrorists who's only goal is to murder and destroy.
They see themselves as freedom fighters, holy warriors, the peoples saviors, etc, etc.
Those who get shot, bombed, maimed, etc, see them as terrorists and any who support them as supporters of terrorism.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Sique]

I have a very good understanding how this works. We are talking about Germany, and here keyloggers are illegal and not allowed as investigative means because of exactly that.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozambique: http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/renamo.htm is short and makes interesting reading. There is nothing there about US support, only S African (and originally Rhodesian).

Angola: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/264094.stm is the obituary for the leader of Unita. Nuff said.

To your 'trash the US in 60 minutes', I remember the insanity which was the Reagan foreign policy, and the amazement when Bush ('4 more years') came to power and changed e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Remember when Iraq attacked Iran and the US joined in on Iraq's side? That turkey came home to roost as well. The US under Reagan supported terrorists while professing to fight terrorism.

If you really want some fun, google 'us support khmer rouge' and look around. Apparently the US encouraged China to support those nice Cambodians during the Carter (!!) and Reagan years (this was after Vietnam got tired of Khmer Rouge activities and invaded). Bush stopped that as well. Some of those sources look rather unreliable.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[CubicleView]

Ah but if the police installed something, along with a patch preventing them from accessing it again, they could prove that no one else could access it by not be able to access it themselves!

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Luckz]

We let judges decide cases, not juries.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[mpe]

History has repeatedly proven that when a government asks its citizens to give up liberties it is working against making society safer but more absolute and submissive. Can you provide with any example where people who gave up their freedoms became safer?

To make things a little easier, myths and legands acceptable, anywhere on the planet any time...

I can cite alot of counterexamples: nazi/fascist/communist governments that miserably failed in all fronts, including safety (the state safety-keeping apparatus turned against the citizens).

Counterexamples are trivially easy to find. Yet somehow those advocating handing lots of power over to the state think things will be different "this time". Which is one of the definitions of insanity.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

You are right. It was even one of his generals who coined it. I picked up the term from Bernt Engelmann's autobiography, some time I'll have to look it again and see if he used Feldherr or Führer. Facts suspect ;-)

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[TooMuchToDo]

Ah, but the police can't guarantee that the "patch" they install, nor their initial malware install isn't open to vulnerabilities.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[haruchai]

I can't help but smile after reading your post and your username.
  The CIA are not supposed to operate on American soil.
  That is the domain of the FBI. It was the police and the FBI
  that fought against the Panthers.
  Also, the Black Panthers were very probably the main reason
  why nearly all police departments became racially integrated
  in the late 60s and early 70s.
  In many ways, they were misguided and their militant base
  may have been seen as more representative of their goals but,
  in large part, they were trying to balance the treatment of
  people of color by the police.
  And, they were capable of change - while they may have started
  out as black-centric, they were moving towards a more inclusionary
  agenda but, in those times, it's doubtful that a socialist,
  predominantly black, militant organization would have succeeded.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[phulegart]

Unfortunately, the US (Before it was the US) committed wanton and unspeakable acts of terrorism against the UK once upon a time. This included (but was not limited to) guerilla warfare at a time when combat was expected to follow a more civilized course. The then British colonists used terrorist tactics to gain independence and form the nation we now know and enjoy as the US of A.

Not defending terrorism here, but simply pointing out that terrorism largely a point of view issue. For example. If people violently opposed a policy of the US government, that the US government was wrong in having and enforcing, the US government could protect itself by simply declaring those people terrorists, regardless of how horrible and reprehensible this policy might be. If Slavery were legal today, for example.

But this is way off point.

Skype is but a single tool, apparently. The whole point of the encryption is that it *should* be uncrackable. I smell a whole "guilty until proven innocent" argument lurking below.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Kadin2048]

Why? If the police can, in extreme situations, apply to a court for a warrant to search a suspect's house, open their mail or tap their phone - and the US and almost every other country allows this - why shouldn't they be able to search a suspect's computer? Personally I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the very idea of surreptitious searches. I cannot speak to German legal tradition, but I don't believe that such things were really ever envisioned as the kinds of "searches" and "seizures" mentioned in the Constitution here in the U.S.

If the police need to search someone's computer, and they have probable cause, I would much prefer they kick down the door with a SWAT team in the full light of day, confiscate everything, and then disassemble it forensically, than use trojan horse programs. Although on the surface it might seem that kicking down the door is a lot more severe, I think it's less prone to abuse by virtue of its severity. I would rather force the police to take the more severe, heavyhanded approach, than give the authorities a way of spying on citizens that's not obvious.

To be blunt, I don't trust the "authorities" enough to give them the powers to conduct surreptitious surveillance. Sadly, it may be too late to take them back.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[anagama]

Who cares if the cops program is exploitable or not? It's obvious that the user's computer is exploitable and plain that some nefarious group made use of that weakness. Then they began doing their thing, the cops noticed it, and exploited the computer yet again. If the cops want to see what's on the machine, why not get a warrant and look (here I'm thinking US, I know nothing of German procedures)?

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's quite obviously been used ironically. I'm guessing you must be German.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Artifakt]

Using spyware to search a computer is a separate method. Police already have the option to get a warrant and physically seize and then search the computer with some very good forensic tools if they have probable cause. In principle, to justify the police keeping spyware tools around, with the additional risk they may be misused, is similar to justifying the police needing new anti-riot weapons, more powerful firearms, or any other special equipment that could entail a risk to innocent bystanders.
        One justification might be that the police have enough evidence to get a conventional warrant, but don't know where the computer physically is - rather all they know is a network location. But is this likely to be true? Rather, if the police don't know where the machine is in the real world, aren't they also less likely to know where the machine's owner resides, or other facts they would normally present to get a warrant? Aren't they going to have trouble proving they are targeting a machine that is owned by the suspect, and not one hacked remotely, belonging to someone else? And if they don't know where the machine is, how can they even be sure it's not outside their jurisdiction?
        This looks like a way around having to first conduct enough of an investigation to get a conventional warrant, or else for the police to get around respecting the law themselves. If they remotely access a rooted box, and that box's actual owner keeps legal or medical records for hundreds of people on it, then the police wouldn't have to exercise the care they would with a physical warrant. There would be no office manager informing them that the box contained sensitive records or observing the search. The innocent third party would have no knowledge of the search, and no chance to appeal the warrant.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[FutureDomain]

These searches are especially important in cases where the suspects are aware that their internet traffic and phone calls may be monitored and choose to store sensitive information directly on their hard drives without emailing it.

That's the real point of the story, not that Skype is unbreakable. Exactly. It's just an excuse to be able to install Trojans on others computers.

But if terrorists are smart enough to use encrypted Skype instead of a normal phone, wouldn't they also be smart enough to encrypt any sensitive information with Truecrypt?
I suspect the real reason is that with the ability to scan terrorist's computers they could also use the law to scan other people's computers too.
How many laws that were supposed to be used to protect the country have been used to investigate copyright laws or "suspicious people". I fully support gathering information from terrorists, but it is far too easy for the government to use them to enforce trivial or unconstitutional laws.

~~FutureDomain~~

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[anagama]

Everything you cite is a specific act of some kind which the law proscribes. The current discussion is about whether the cops should have the power to arbitrarily search your computer in the ABSENCE of a court issued warrant, i.e., anytime they damn well please. That's a whole lot different from punishing a particular act.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

OK, imagine another scenario, the cops exploit the computer. They instal their trojan and then look for evidence to see if the computer had previously been exploited. No nefarious group made use of that weakness at any time before the cops and the weakness required someone to physically install something in order to work.

Now, you have someone certifying that no other exploits were taken advantage of. Where is the difference?

and yes, if the cops want to see whats on the machine, they will get a warrant and look. This is how they would get the authority to use their program. They would get a warrant and look around but it would be without you knowing it.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[anagama]

they have been attempting to expel the ... invaders.

Sounds like what's going on in the middle east, yet all who oppose the west there are branded terrorists, not fighters in a civil war.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

Well, the targets are a pretty good indicator of terrorism too. It is a hard sell to claim someone is a freedom fighter if their acts are to blow up train stations and their target is innocent people who only crime is living and trying to provide for their families. It isn't all smoke and mirrors. But A good portion of it could be.

This is probably why there isn't really one official and true definition of terrorism that fits every legal framework around the world.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[anagama]

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

Watch it, Share it.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Kattspya]

Hmmm... If it was Keitel that coined the term he probably didn't mean it in a negative sense. Keitel is probably one of the greatest yes-men ever. It's not so surprising that he was the author of that sentence only he was serious. It looks like the ones who didn't like Hitler took that phrase and ran with it.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[josephdrivein]

The Bundestrojaner would make snooping simpler, both in technical and in legal terms. I can't understand why the choice of the tool used for wiretapping should affect the legal side of the issue.
I fear you imply that if it is easy to do, it doesn't require a warrant. This is false in my country and should be so in every civilized country.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right. T entire FA looks like bullshit to me. This paragraph, for instance:

"Experts say Skype and other Voice over internet Protocol (VoIP) calling software are difficult to intercept because they work by breaking up voice data into small packets and switching them along thousands of router paths instead of a constant circuit between two parties, as with a traditional call."

.. says NOTHING about encryption. Instead, they describe the same packet-switched system that EVERYTHING ELSE on the Internet utilizes! If they can intercept other packet-based communications, why is Skype so difficult? I understand that there's a P2P infrastructure involved, but it goes without saying that if you were to set up enough "fake" Skype nodes, you could tap a significant percentage of the overall traffic. Of course, this is assuming NO encryption, so it's a moot point ^_^

Encryption only adds another layer of difficulty to the wiretapping process. Perhaps they should talk to Skype Technologies S.A. (22/24 Boulevard Royal, L-2449 Luxembourg) before assuming it's so impossible. For all the BKA Gestapo know, Skype may just happily hand over the keys in the name of international security, but they didn't bother even asking!

Yes, TFA appears to be nothing more than fluffy clouds to hide a Bush-style undermining of checks and balances. Disgusting.

--AC

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Dogtanian]

You cannot simplify this the way you are attempting to do. The IRA was a revolutionary army and Ireland was a quasi civil war. From the ancient times, they have been attempting to expel the English invaders. And much of Al Qaeda's recruiting propaganda revolves around wanting to expel the American presence in Saudi Arabia. (In fact, this is a very major factor in Wahhabi anti-Americanism; agree with it or not, it should be more widely-known that this is a greater factor than many in the west acknowledge... but I'm getting sidetracked here).

So this isn't really a situation where terrorist were attacking england as much as it was a situation where a revolution was attempting to happen and they resorted to terrorist actions. That's a matter of perspective. If it was- as you assert- a civil war, then it was only one involving Northern Ireland. Since there was not a notable percentage of the English population involved in it, or seeking to become part of Ireland, it could reasonably be argued that this was an attack on another population. Technically, they are both part of the UK, and ultimately ruled by London, but it is misleading to present it as a "civil war" on that basis.

The Timothy McVeigh case was much closer to "civil war" terrorism, and I can't begin to imagine the amount of hostility and naked aggression that would ensue if the UK harboured such terrorists and permitted them to fundraise.

It you were on the other side, you would be calling the British terrorist Various British actions might or might have not been justified, but they were clearly not intentionally "terrorist" in the way they were carried out.

There is no hypocrisies in it at all. Simply because you cannot directly relate the two situations. I appreciate that the two situations are far from identical; and I'll also point out that 9/11 was (as a single incident) far greater than anything the IRA perpetrated. Still, as you point out and I will point out to you, this is not as simple as you think it is.

The essence is that had things happened the other way around, things would have been quite different. The Americans were willing to tolerate and provide shelter for terrorist groups who conducted attacks against their supposed allies, and yelped and expected co-operation when they were attacked by terrorists.

Hypocrites.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Myopic]

Thanks for the information; I stand corrected, though my basic point stands, I think.

My username is literal, not figurative; I am literally shortsighted, not figuratively shortsighted (I hope). I may be ignorant, though, in which case I rely on people like you to kindly point it out.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[KKlaus]

Should I be able to possess whatever hazardous materials I wish without respect to training or available equipment? Drive any way I please? What about owning explosives, or shooting at my neighbors? My point is that it should be obvious to you that there are plenty of liberties that deserve to be given up. The fact that you think it's entirely obvious that the liberties you like are in all matters a benefit to society, should worry you. That's a big red flag for the presence of cognitive dissonance. I'm not advocating tossing out the Bill of Rights (obviously), but the case for and against many of our liberties is hardly as clear as you make it.

The state could clearly make me safer by keeping me locked in my house with a bunch of armed guards protecting me, and carefully selecting my food and watching my health. The argument against that set-up is that it would suck, not that it wouldn't be safe. There are no physical laws that imply that the society with the most liberty will be safest (even if that's what you may desire), and using a bunch of governments that in no way had the safety of their citizens as a goal to prove otherwise is bad logic. I'm not sure you can make that case that their totalitarianism itself was entirely the root of their bad safety records.

In any case, the argument against the Nanny state and the Big Brother state needs to be the states themselves, not that they won't ever ever make us safer. Because in at least some (perhaps many) cases they will. The point needs to be that it's a very bad trade. If you try to argue the safety angle, you undermine yourself with those cases in which you are obviously wrong, and undermine your whole argument. The greater public would not have modded your comment +5, and it's them that really need to be convinced.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[neomunk]

I'll go through the list, but first let me state that most REASONABLE laws are a balance between two parties' freedoms, not a trade off between liberty and security. There have been many unreasonable laws implemented (as the GP points out) and you offer quite a few of them in your list. Here we go, point by point:

Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater?

Actually, look up the origins of this ole' gem. It was coined in an attempt to stifle political dissent, not a very good example of enhancing security. In the LITERAL case of yelling fire in a crowded theater, you are infringing upon other people's essential freedom of reasonable safety. By putting other people at risk of personal harm you are doing more infringing than you are expressing, and the law demonstrates proper balance.

I know, some of you are going to point out that "people's essential freedom of reasonable safety" is the same thing as security. The difference is a matter of quantification. Figuring HOW MANY people are you prevented from losing the freedom of REASONABLE (it's caps because it's important) safety, balanced against the freedoms you are limiting in the attempt is a little easier to get your hands on than 'what about the children?!?', if you catch my drift. In most cases today when you see the balance of safety/liberty being called into question, it's almost always obvious which side is more reasonable just my doing the math. You know, things like (number of people hurt by terrorism)/(number of people wiretapped) and so forth. Patterns start to emerge, and the results are starting to look obscenely lopsided.

The rights of states to secede from the Union?

That had nothing to do with security, and everything to do with economics and nationalism. No balance between freedom and security to find here, only a balance between freedom and economic and social factors.

The right to own slaves?

Again, you have no right to infringe on other people's rights. Any laws written in such a vein are tools of oppression/division. And how EXACTLY does this particular infringement of freedoms make people safer? That's an odd proclamation to make.

The right to marry multiple women?

Again, where does this have anything to do with security? And what about the right to marry multiple MEN? I don't understand at all where you're going with this question, it's just another example of a law designed to make the population more submissive to authority.

The right to fuck children?

Again, this is a serious infringement of someone else's rights. You are doing serious harm to a child by 'fucking' them, thus infringing on their liberties in a manor grossly outweighing any expressions of freedom you may claim.

The right to freely use/purchase/sell heroin?

Here's where you come close (still no cigar). In my personal opinion, this is another case of bad law. You should have absolute sovereignty over what substances enter/do not enter your system. However I CAN UNDERSTAND (though still disagree with) the argument that heroin use increases the chance of committing other crimes. In this case it is STILL bad law, because it's making illegal the increase probability of infringement of other's rights, not actual infringement.

The right to plot the assassination of the President of the Unites States?

FFS, this is ludicrous. First, if it IS illegal to plot such a thing with NO INTENTION of acting upon it then that is bad law at it's shiniest. Second, if you're planning to DO such a thing you're (of course) attempting to infringe on another person's essential right to life. Can you figure out the balance here?

The right to kill for any arbitrary reason?

I've covered this in sufficient detail.

The right to cross the highway on foot?

You're infringing on other's rights to properly use the equipment they own (have paid for), their rig

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Singapore. Draconian laws with little civil rights and the crime rate plummeted.

There is no question about these results, so spare me your rationalizations....

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Mattsson]

We're talking points of view here.
In their mind, they might be removing evil subscribers of religion X, as a holy deed in their holy war against the great Evil.

The rest of the world sees them as deranged terrorists that target innocent people who's only crime is living and trying to provide for their families.

There's always those who can be fooled into believing that something is "Good"
There's always those who can be fooled into believing that something is "Evil"
The most dangerous one is he who can fool them, but without the fools, he would be powerless.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[petermgreen]

Searching alone will only get you the data on the machine at the time you seize it. Some of that data may be useless because of encryption and other stuff may never have been stored on the hard drive in the first place. Placing spy software secretly will get them data that passes through that machine without being stored.

For a physiscal world analogy it is the difference between entering a house to search and seize and entering a house to play hidden survilence equipment and record conversations.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

First of all, There are reasons for everything. Do you actually think someone in the white house said "oh, oh, they are killing innocent people lets support the"? If you do, you are more stupid then I originally gave you credit for. The BBC links easily explains why we were on the side we were on, there were cuban troops armed by the soviets and everyone know we were trying to stop the soviets and the cubans at the time. I fail to see your point in this light.

Do you have any idea why the US went on the side of Iraq? And no, it wasn't a turkey coming home to roost. Kuwait had been paying Iraq to protect them from Iran who Kuwait thought was going to invade. As part of the issues there, Iraq went to war with Iran and America, who had been long time friends with Kuwait since before the 1900's supported Iraq because of our association with Kuwait.

The war was over, Kuwait didn't think Iran was a threat any more and stopped paying Iraq for protection. Iraq was pissed and claimed Kuwait was slant drilling into their oil fields and invaded Kuwait. The US kicked them out with the help of the rest of the world. We didn't create anything.

If you really want some fun, google 'us support khmer rouge' and look around. Apparently the US encouraged China to support those nice Cambodians during the Carter (!!) and Reagan years (this was after Vietnam got tired of Khmer Rouge activities and invaded). Bush stopped that as well. Some of those sources look rather unreliable.

Yes, it is fun to know a little about something and spout your opinion of it as facts. You can even push your negetive opinions around. So far, everything you seem to have mentioned totally escapes part of the reality that was when it happened in an attempt to imply something else.

Maybe you should continue looking and reading and some back when you know something about the cold war and can understand that our involvement in the middle east has more to do then just oil. However, a big part of the lead up to the Iraq-Iran war was Iran's lock down of the Suez? canal. But that was more or less incidental to what happened.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Do you actually think someone in the white house said "oh, oh, they are killing innocent people lets support the"? Hey, we are talking Reagan years here. The defining characteristics were fanatical anti-communism and general cluelessness about what they were up to.

Unita were basically a vehicle for Savimbi's ambitions. The S Africans jumped on the bandwagon in order to destabilise Angola, relieving the pressure on themselves and (what is now) Namibia. Reagan (and Margaret Thatcher) quite liked S Africa the way it was, disliked the Communist regime in Angola and pumped money+arms into Angola. Cia sources indicate up to 1.5 million dead, current population just over 12 million. As to your comment on the Cubans and the Soviets, chicken and egg. The Cubans were supporting the Angolan government in their fight against foreign sponsored terrorists. Since the fighting stopped when Savimbi died, 20/20 hindsight makes it clear he was the problem.

The situation with Iraq/Iran was a bit different. If anything, Iraq had closer ties with the USSR. The key factor here was the hostage affair in the Tehran US embassy, once that was over the US was looking to punish Iran. I read claims from Saddam Hussein during that war that the US had encouraged him to attack Iran by telling him that the Iranian army was weakened and demoralised after the revolution. Rather strange was: Iraq attacked the USS Stark and the US reacted by increasing their support for Iraq.

Why do you think Iran had a lockdown on the Suez canal *before* Iraq attacked them? After the attack they tried to stop Iraq selling oil by mounting a blockade.

Your claim that Kuwait has always had close ties with the US is interesting, again, CIA sources indicate close ties with the UK but I have never heard of the US being involved there until recent times. Iran was talking about 'exporting their revolution' back then but Iraq was not acting as a proxy for Kuwait when they went in. Your take on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is close enough to mine that we don't need to argue that one. Why did the US not stop supporting Iraq after the gas attacks on the Kurds?

Years later Iran had a new government, Iraq was the pariah and then we had 9/11/2001. Iran promptly offered their support to the US and proceeded to turn words into deeds. Then came the 'Axis of Evil' speech followed by the invasion of Iraq. Iran had to accept that nothing they could do would be good enough. They have a new head of state and appear to be trying to drive the US out of Iraq (and Afghanistan) with all means at their disposal.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[OrangeTide]

The CIA has been laundering money through cocaine trade, and hiring contractors for assassinations and black ops that have mafia connections for those fifty years.

You're thinking of the FBI which are a national police force, and which generally do have real restrictions placed on them to protect the rights and privacy of citizens.

When the CIA operates on US soil against US citizens it is a blatant violation of US law and time and time again has been shown to cause harm to the people of this nation.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[OrangeTide]

I would call it gullibility rather than insanity. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me four hundred ninety-seven times, shame on me.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Chris Mattern]

Bundesverfassungsgericht

Mark Twain was right. The German language is a tool of the devil.

Chris Mattern

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Myopic]

You are correct. I mistook the CIA for the FBI. Thanks for pointing out my mistake. No comment on the rest of what you say.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[nasor]

If the police can pick the lock to your house and find evidence inside during a search, then presumably anyone else could have picked the lock and planted the evidence there. But I don't think you'll get far trying to claim that you aren't responsible for the guns/drugs/whatever that the police found in your house because "the fact that they could break in proves that your house was compromised."

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Alsee]

You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law does not change.

I happen to live in New York. I for one refuse to allow terrorists to terrorize. I for one refuse to cower in fear. Terrorists can kill a number of people - any drunk nut with an automatic weapon in a schoolyard or a mall can kill a number of people. However terrorists cannot destroy America. Only Americans can destroy America - fearmongering powermongering gestapo-police-state idiots terrorizing fellow Americans into destroying America.

It's funny how it was New York that got hit on 9/11, but how New Yorkers are some of the loudest voices objecting to fearmongering and objecting to surrendering freedom in the name of police-state security measures.

I live in New York. I refuse to be terrorized. We need to pursue and combat terrorists - be we need to do it in a pre-9/11 world with a pre-9/11 mindset and pre-9/11 laws.

First you ensure rights and civil liberties and limits on government powers, and then and only then do you pass laws and allow police to pursue criminals within those constraints. It would certainly be easier for the police to prevent crime and catch criminals in they could engage in warrantless searches and seizures and wiretaps, it would indeed make us safer from common criminals. But no, "actually making society safer" is not an acceptable or tolerable justification. First you ensure rights and civil liberties and limits on government powers. If the police then overstep those bounds, if for example the police obtain evidence without a proper search warrant, then the evidence is thrown out of court and the criminal goes free. And setting the criminal free is the correct response, because a government which itself has become criminal is a far more dangerous thing than any criminal individual. Sometimes liberties and rights are a nuisance and impediment to police fighting crime and catching criminals, oh well, too bad.

Terrorists have failed to terrorize me, but some of my fellow Americans have me scared shitless. People who advocate fear, people who use it as an argument to surrender their own liberty and rights, and to forcibly revoke OTHER PEOPLE's liberties and rights, to destroy America.

Warrantless wiretaps. Free Speech Zones. Arbitrary non-judicial National Security Letters. Denial of Habeas Corpus. A president who calls the Constitution a "Goddamn peice of paper". Torture.

NO, it is not worth it. NO, NOT even if it "does make society safer".

P.S.
I wrote first hand as an American and in relation to specific issues of my fellow Americans, but the message itself is intended to be global. There are frighteningly many people all across the globe who like police states and who think it is a grand idea for themselves to infringe the rights and liberties of others in the name of security. It was just easier to speak in a first hand context, with 9/11 potentially becoming America's own version of the Reichstag fire. Violating rights and liberties and instituting police state measures is a global pattern, fearmongers who wish to institute such measures in the name of security are the real enemy. They need to be fought from the start, for the process and the government powers feed upon themselves and it becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible to oppose them after they have gotten rolling.

-

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

The problem is that the terrorist don't represent the people living there. They represent an oppressive portion of them. And when you look at the polls in Iraq, They don't want the Americans out. Sure that is contrary to popular opinion, but it is true. In every poll that asks when the Americans should leave, the overwhelming majority, while saying they don't want us there, say they don't want us to leave yet. They want certain goals archived first.

but yes, I will agree with you. It is a conflicting situation. But if you take everything into account, then it isn't quite as jaded. But it surely isn't black and white. There are many facets to the situations and complexities that aren't readily observed by some not already in the know.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

And much of Al Qaeda's recruiting propaganda revolves around wanting to expel the American presence in Saudi Arabia. (In fact, this is a very major factor in Wahhabi anti-Americanism; agree with it or not, it should be more widely-known that this is a greater factor than many in the west acknowledge... but I'm getting sidetracked here).

I am familier with this but unfortunately, it isn't as easy to get out of the region as some might think. We ended up being invested greatly after the fall of the ottoman empire WW1. It would be almost like asking someone to abandon their home or busyness because after you built the neighborhood up, they don't like your way of doing things.

That's a matter of perspective. If it was- as you assert- a civil war, then it was only one involving Northern Ireland. Since there was not a notable percentage of the English population involved in it, or seeking to become part of Ireland, it could reasonably be argued that this was an attack on another population. Technically, they are both part of the UK, and ultimately ruled by London, but it is misleading to present it as a "civil war" on that basis.

The Timothy McVeigh case was much closer to "civil war" terrorism, and I can't begin to imagine the amount of hostility and naked aggression that would ensue if the UK harboured such terrorists and permitted them to fundraise.

I was debating on whether or not to address these separate. You seem intelligent enough that I shouldn't confuse you so I will keep it brief.

This all depends on if you considered Ireland an independent country, a conquered territory, an intricate part of the UK, or a little america that was given a form of self rule that was basically a puppet government and England had the ability to lay taxes (without representation) and override local rule. During the hight of the problem, it was portrayed as all of those. So you had some people thinking the IRA was revolting, some thinking it was a terrorist group and some convinced of a symbolic link to American history.

And if I remember right, Even though innocent civilians were caught up and killed in the process, the targets of the attacks were primarily Military or leadership targets. They didn't walk into a crowded mall and blow up a tanker of liquid chlorine so the resulting gas would kill the entire city if the wind was blowing right and all along have some video floating around demanding that someone not even connected to the incident change something about their behavior.

Timothy McVeigh, I agree with the resulting sentiment. But I don't think it was any closer to a civil war then Ireland. Once you see the other ways of looking at it.

I appreciate that the two situations are far from identical; and I'll also point out that 9/11 was (as a single incident) far greater than anything the IRA perpetrated. Still, as you point out and I will point out to you, this is not as simple as you think it is.

I don't think it is simple at all. I was hoping the overall theme of my post was that is isn't a simple thing. None of it is.

The essence is that had things happened the other way around, things would have been quite different. The Americans were willing to tolerate and provide shelter for terrorist groups who conducted attacks against their supposed allies, and yelped and expected co-operation when they were attacked by terrorists.

Well, to an extent. We actually locked up the ones that committed crimes. It isn't like they were scott free. The people left alone were not connected to crimes or there wasn't enough evidence to convince us of it. It was one of those political prisoners things that we gave them asylum. And to note, there was, and still is, an international treaty that directs us (they UK too) to harbor these political prisoners if they get to our shored and ask for asylum.

Now I'm not going to pretend that w

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[iminplaya]

Because we should use whatever abilities we have to put an end to the blatant abuses perpetrated by the authorities. Turns out they are just as crooked as the "crooks". Under the present circumstances, we need to resist any incursions by any means. I'm thinking, cheap homemade tasers for everybody. Time to fight fire with fire.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[cheater512]

It would only work if the user was incompetent.

If you were doing something you wanted to keep secret, and you knew they could be watching, then you'd act accordingly.
Using a LiveCD comes to mind.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

My god, how do you keep anything straight in your head. Not only did you _Not_understand a word I said, you are attempting to add to it in an effort to compensate for your lack of knowledge.

Unita were basically a vehicle for Savimbi's ambitions. The S Africans jumped on the bandwagon in order to destabilise Angola, relieving the pressure on themselves and (what is now) Namibia. Reagan (and Margaret Thatcher) quite liked S Africa the way it was, disliked the Communist regime in Angola and pumped money+arms into Angola. Cia sources indicate up to 1.5 million dead, current population just over 12 million. As to your comment on the Cubans and the Soviets, chicken and egg. The Cubans were supporting the Angolan government in their fight against foreign sponsored terrorists. Since the fighting stopped when Savimbi died, 20/20 hindsight makes it clear he was the problem.

It was a damn cold war. We supported assholes because they weren't as bad as the people we didn't like. A cold war is a war that you don't fight with acts of war. You get others to do it for you in an attempt to defeat something the other side is doing.

The situation with Iraq/Iran was a bit different. If anything, Iraq had closer ties with the USSR. The key factor here was the hostage affair in the Tehran US embassy, once that was over the US was looking to punish Iran. I read claims from Saddam Hussein during that war that the US had encouraged him to attack Iran by telling him that the Iranian army was weakened and demoralised after the revolution. Rather strange was: Iraq attacked the USS Stark and the US reacted by increasing their support for Iraq.

The hostage affair happened in 1979, about 3 years after Iran canceled arms contracts with the US. That's right, Iran was a decent buyer of US arms since the 40's/50's or so. The Iraq war happened in September of 1980 as the result of a border dispute over one of the waterways and Khomeini's "Shia". I believe it was the Algiers. The hostage situation was over with and Iran was under the control of Khomeini by the time we started supporting Iraq.

The so called weakness that we told Iraq about, was not telling them specifically. We attempted to continue our support contracts because a lot of the arms we sold Iran before the Islamic republic revolution required on going maintenance that was being supplied by American companies, The Iranians not only didn't know how to do the maintenance, they didn't have the tools or replacement parts to get the job done. So the weakness was known, but it wasn't a secrete.

Why do you think Iran had a lockdown on the Suez canal *before* Iraq attacked them? After the attack they tried to stop Iraq selling oil by mounting a blockade.

Actually, the Suez crisis was in the mid 50's and part of the conflict with Israel and I believe it was Egypt that locked it down. I misspoke and was thinking of the Algiers river which is a strategic waterway along the border between the two countries. There was a peace accord over it in 1975 that Saddam claimed Iran repeatedly violated it to the point it was non-existent when he invaded.

Your claim that Kuwait has always had close ties with the US is interesting, again, CIA sources indicate close ties with the UK but I have never heard of the US being involved there until recent times. Iran was talking about 'exporting their revolution' back then but Iraq was not acting as a proxy for Kuwait when they went in. Your take on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is close enough to mine that we don't need to argue that one. Why did the US not stop supporting Iraq after the gas attacks on the Kurds?

Kuwait has always been a port of shipping. It was one of the oldest US allies before the mid 1800s. It then was trading spices brought in from India and later, we began buying pearls from them later too. After WW2, the British where in political charge of Kuwait but they gained t

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Dogtanian]

I am familier with this but unfortunately, it isn't as easy to get out of the region as some might think. I wasn't attempting to justify this, and in fact, I doubt leaving the region would solve the problem at this stage. On the contrary, it would probably give encouragement to the Wahhabi extremists, which I consider a Very Bad Thing. But it is undeniably a factor, and one which is downplayed in the West.

Regarding Ireland, although the English undoubtedly attempted to colonise it with their own people around 400 years ago, this is no more recent than the colonisation of most of the United States. So unless the (non-native) Americans consider their country and population to be invaders and withdraw, and would tolerate terrorist attacks by Native Americans(!), they have no moral legitimacy over their standards on the Ireland/Northern Ireland situation. Well, that's one way of looking at it.

And if I remember right, You're mistaken:-

Even though innocent civilians were caught up and killed in the process, the targets of the attacks were primarily Military or leadership targets. They didn't walk into a crowded mall They bombed the centre of Manchester in 1996. To be fair, they gave warning, but this is was not by the widest stretch of anyone's imagination a military target.

On the other hand, there was no such warning with the Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing. Although this was supposedly not sanctioned by the IRA "leadership", IMHO if that was the case, it brings into question as much whether those people were truly the leaders of the IRA than whether it was an "IRA" attack.

Remembrance Day may have been a "military" remembrance, but that would be a tenuous excuse to treat it as a military bombing. Remembrance Day is strongly associated with the sacrifice of those fighting during WWI and WWII- what mad this attack even more disgusting (IMHO) is that the (pre-Provisional) IRA collaborated with the Nazis before *and during* WWII.

Or what about the various pub bombings, including one in Birmingham. Yes, there were plenty of attacks on military targets. There were also plenty on blatantly civilian targets.

Well, to an extent. We actually locked up the ones that committed crimes. But you permitted the continuation of fundraising for a terrorist organisation.

Now I'm not going to pretend that we had every one who did something bad locked up. We had organized crime for decades and couldn't even get that taken care of. That's a failure of execution, not of intent. It's not the same as intentionally going soft on them or tolerating fundraising because of votes from the sentimentalist terrorist-sympathisers within the Irish-American population.

But for the most part, the ones who blew people up or killed someone weren't exactly walking the streets here as a government directive. They may not have been put to justice as they deserved, and some might not have even been bothered. That makes it sound like the authorities weren't even trying.

But it wasn't a cake walk for them. Oh, well that makes it okay then!

No offence, I don't want it to come across like I'm taking this personally; nor do I personally consider you an "opponent". But that comes across as a silly, wishy-washy half-baked self-justifying excuse.... "Well, they didn't have it *that* easy you know. Some of them were only allowed to own black-and-white televisions, you know!"

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[petermgreen]

most survillance measures have corresponding countermeasures. That does not render them useless.

I agree though that a hardware approach would probablly be more effective.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

Regarding Ireland, although the English undoubtedly attempted to colonise it with their own people around 400 years ago, this is no more recent than the colonisation of most of the United States. So unless the (non-native) Americans consider their country and population to be invaders and withdraw, and would tolerate terrorist attacks by Native Americans(!), they have no moral legitimacy over their standards on the Ireland/Northern Ireland situation. Well, that's one way of looking at it.

Well, it isn't directly comparable in that sense. You see, the big difference was self rule and the ability to participate in that. The American Indians did do terrorist acts in rebellion and we answered in force too. But fortunately, for humankind overall, we have started looking down on the type of force that we used which gave england some problems when people started dealing with it in modern times. There always has been a force in Ireland that rejected English rule and the quasi self rule that was forced on them. And this force survived the 400 years you mentioned. The big difference is that tactics changed after people started studying the French resistance during WW2.

And No, I'm not saying anyone was justified in anything. Neither us nor them. I'm not making moral judgments. I don't think we can primarily because Today, the world isn't the same as it was then. I mean 40 years was enough to know that dropping a nuke was bad and we probably shouldn't have used them in WW2. But that doesn't mean we don't have the moral authority to say don't let anyone use them again. Times have changed and the perceptions of events have changed. I seriously doubt that the IRA was sitting around thinking of how they can kill people to justify the act of killing them. They had reasons that compelled others. And the situation is too complicated to say X means Y.

But you permitted the continuation of fundraising for a terrorist organisation.

Permited and not stopping are separate things. Do you honestly think some politician was thinking "Lets allow these guys to raise funds so they can kill and main people in England"? Do you think we actually knew that they were going to be killing people? Or was the general consensus that they were going to work in a civilized manor with england to settle their differences? Here is a hint, We financially supported the Palestinian governments even though Palestinians were blowing up Jews. And we stopped supporting them when the militant groups took control of the Palestinian government. You can in effect say that we funded Palestine in acts of aggression against Israel, another country we fund. But nobody looks at it that way because getting one side to kill the other was not the objective.

That's a failure of execution, not of intent. It's not the same as intentionally going soft on them or tolerating fundraising because of votes from the sentimentalist terrorist-sympathisers within the Irish-American population.

The failure of execution was because at the time, we were/are a nations of laws and rights. We couldn't just go in and arrest these people because they had rights to due process and all. Some speculate at how this has been watered down, some even take the words George Bush Spoke at a journalist dinner where it is customary for the politicians to become stand up comics and make fin of themselves as proof. But the same problem was around for the IRA members and supporters. You weren't going to get the government to go against the constitution to ring these guys down. It would be a waste of money at the time because the courts would just set them free. Again, this is something that isn't directly comparable to todays times and isn't directly a black and white issue. There are many complexities to it.

That makes it sound like the authorities weren't even trying.

You see, just because it appears one way doesn't mean it

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Dogtanian]

There always has been a force in Ireland that rejected English rule and the quasi self rule that was forced on them. You're aware that the majority of Ireland has been independent of the UK since *1921*, right? And you're also aware that the majority of the populace of Northern Ireland are in favour of remaining a part of the UK?

If you accept that you can't kick a population out because they shouldn't have invaded 400 years ago, then you can't argue against that. One point of contention is that only six of the nine counties of Ulster actually formed Northern Ireland, and had all nine been counted, it probably would have been in favour of independence. But the fact remains that the people in those six counties wanted to remain a part of the UK.

You seem to be under the impression that "England" is ruling against the democratic wishes of the people of Northern Ireland. This is incorrect. While a democratic mandate doesn't absolve the UK government of dealing with the problems and issues of a strongly divided population, it provides more legitimacy for the province to be a part of the UK than of Ireland. If (and probably when, given the faster growth of the Catholic population) the majority of people there wish to become a part of Ireland, I'll be happy for that to happen.

Permited and not stopping are separate things. You're arguing over semantics instead of what was clearly meant. You *tolerated* the fundraising of an anti-democratic terrorist organisation directly opposed to one of your major allies.

Do you honestly think some politician was thinking "Lets allow these guys to raise funds so they can kill and main people in England"? No, I think the sleazy fuck was thinking of how he could appease a section of his voters and get re-elected.

Do you think we actually knew that they were going to be killing people? Wow.... given that this continued *long* after they'd been doing exactly that during the 1970s, you certainly *should* have known(!!)

Or was the general consensus that they were going to work in a civilized manor with england to settle their differences? I see very no evidence- even from the perspective of that time- that the IRA were planning on doing that.

We couldn't just go in and arrest these people because they had rights to due process and all. I agree. My main criticism of the US was that they openly tolerated fundraising on behalf of a terrorist organisation (as described above).

That makes it sound like the authorities weren't even trying. You see, just because it appears one way doesn't mean it was/is. I was referring specifically to the situation as you had attempted to explain and/or justify it.

With regard the the remainder; yes, morals change. However, I still very strongly doubt that the difference in standards towards terrorism was due to the 10-to-30-year lapse between most of the IRA atrocities and 9/11.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[bluefoxlucid]

Well, no, I mean if you can say with certainty that a certain test produces a false positive 99% of the time, you can invert the results and make positive == negative and get a true negative 99% of the time and a possible false positive/negative/whatever 1%. Tests are worthless when they give you near 50% accuracy; when they're known INCORRECT (not flakey, but actually known to be wrong) a large percentage of the time, they still give you a known result, which you can invert in a binary result set.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[ravenII]

You read the whole article! thanks.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that in uk there is less crime although people gave up right to bear arms.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

You're aware that the majority of Ireland has been independent of the UK since *1921*, right? And you're also aware that the majority of the populace of Northern Ireland are in favour of remaining a part of the UK?

Yes, I am aware of that. I am also aware that England reserved the right to tax Ireland and imposed direct rule on them during this time. This isn't the first time they have done something like that. England has as of this century, exorcised control over Ireland's government, suspended it, taken direct control and eventually gave it back. Also, northern Ireland has only been separated from southern Ireland since 1920 or so, it was only a year or two before England "gave them their country". This "since *1921*" is a loaded date when the material matters become present. You might as well have suggested that Ireland was independent when the king professed that the next ruler of Ireland would be someone born in Ireland and then rushed his pregnant relative over so the English baby would have been born in Ireland.

f you accept that you can't kick a population out because they shouldn't have invaded 400 years ago, then you can't argue against that. One point of contention is that only six of the nine counties of Ulster actually formed Northern Ireland, and had all nine been counted, it probably would have been in favour of independence. But the fact remains that the people in those six counties wanted to remain a part of the UK.

We had something like that happen over hear. History ended up calling it the American Civil War. And don't think for a minute that there was peace for 400 years. There was suppression and constant struggle in each generation since then. This isn't something out of the blue where some kids were tripping and imagined Ireland free from the UK.

You seem to be under the impression that "England" is ruling against the democratic wishes of the people of Northern Ireland. This is incorrect. While a democratic mandate doesn't absolve the UK government of dealing with the problems and issues of a strongly divided population, it provides more legitimacy for the province to be a part of the UK than of Ireland. If (and probably when, given the faster growth of the Catholic population) the majority of people there wish to become a part of Ireland, I'll be happy for that to happen.

No, I am not under that impression at all. The IRA was and they convinced people over here of the same. and that is where the conflict came from. We have a lot of Irish citizens who parents or grandparents came over during the "potato famine" (yes, that's the American name for the great famine" of the mid 1800's). What we know of the famine was that the English merchants continued shipping food from Ireland to England and England refused to send anything back. This caused something like 30% of the populace of Ireland end up dieing. A good portion of the others left the country. Some claim it was calculated genocide. And yes, People ended up taking up arms against England then too.

It appears that you are wanting to pick a point in time, and only deal with that point in todays contexts without considering other mitigating factors. You cannot really do that with a lot of history even though we try to.

You're arguing over semantics instead of what was clearly meant. You *tolerated* the fundraising of an anti-democratic terrorist organisation directly opposed to one of your major allies.

Well, no it isn't semantics. One implies consent, it is permissive as if we took a direct action regarding it. That didn't happen. If we didn't have any laws to stop them, or couldn't put the connections together to prove anything, then according to our constitution, we couldn't do anything about it. That is what some see as a major drawback of a free country. Others see it as a necessary evil to maintain freedom. I'm in the middle with you have to take ev

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

They can... With a warrant... shithead.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Dogtanian]

Okay; let's rephrase that. I used 1921 because it was a reasonable cutoff point, but if you want to look at it that way, I don't see that "England" has interfered in the Republic of Ireland's independence in an unreasonable manner in anything like recent history, and certainly not by the 1970s/1980s.

And don't think for a minute that there was peace for 400 years. There was suppression and constant struggle in each generation since then. Yes, but the question is, where does an invading population become legitimate? Even accounting for what you said, would it have been reasonable to kick out the protestant (or at least Scottish/English-descended) population of Ulster, say, 100 years ago?

This caused something like 30% of the populace of Ireland end up dieing. A good portion of the others left the country. Some claim it was calculated genocide. Intentional genocide or not, I agree that the potato famine was primarily caused by the London-based government's colonisation of Ireland and imposition of their system, and- as you point out- by the continued exportation of goods even when people were starving. In that context, I would have supported (within reason) any action by the Irish people against the "English" government, and actions such as the modern IRA's (and worse) would have had far greater moral legitimacy.

But we're not talking about the early-to-mid 19th century, we're talking about the late 20th century; and we're also talking specifically about the north, not the whole of Ireland.

The IRA wasn't a terrorist group. It was a political group. With respect... bullshit. They may have been doing it for political ends (how many terrorist organisations aren't, though?!). However, they most certainly *were* a terrorist organisation- and I didn't see the IRA themselves participating directly in the political process at all.

If one accepts the generally-held belief that Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA, then that's a different kettle of fish. However, Sinn Fein themselves deny this to be the case (although most likely for practical reasons, since even if everyone "knows" this to be the case, it would change things completely for them to acknowledge it). And when people talk of the IRA, they generally mean the terrorist side, not Sinn Fein, who aren't the IRA (honest, guv ;-) ).

Actually, we have had a state sponsor of terrorism list that we used to ban technology transfers, direct funding, and stuff since the late seventies (maybe earlier?). It is the one thing Reagan did when we started supporting Iraq, we had to remove them from the list. I honestly don't believe that the Irish (or US(!)) governments were actually supporting the IRA, so this may not matter either way.

Looking from the outside in, I see Ireland and their struggles a little differently then you do I guess. While what happened was bad, I don't see it as one sided. By the way, I'm Scottish- not English- and have been in favour of Scottish independence to varying degrees over the years. I consider myself Scottish first, and although I amn't 100% opposed to the Union, I find it uncomfortable to think of myself as British, since that has the air of "Greater England". Although I've grown up a bit and dislike anti-English racism, I'm certainly not English and am aware of having a different viewpoint of the Union as a whole to them. So I'm nowhere near as much on the inside as you seem to think I am.

Also, I'm not religious, and don't come from a sectarian background. So I don't have any axe to grind in that respect. However, what I consider to be the double-standards by the US towards the country (or political entity) that I am- like it or not- a part of, and the acquiescence of the sycophantic UK government in this matter most definitely grates with me.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Mark J Tilford]

Consider sample of 1,000,000,000 people.
1/10,000 of them have the disease (100,000).
The rest (999,900,000) are healthy.
The test is wrong 1/1000 and right 999/1000.

100 sick are diagnosed healthy.
99,900 sick are diagnosed sick.
999,900 healthy are diagnosed sick.
998900100 healthy are diagnosed healthy.

If the result is "sick", the chance is 99900/(99900+999900) = .09 that the person is sick, and 91% that the person is healthy.
If the result is "healthy", the chance is 100/(100+998900100) = 10^-7 that the person is sick, and 99.999% that the person is healthy.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[sumdumass]

Okay; let's rephrase that. I used 1921 because it was a reasonable cutoff point, but if you want to look at it that way, I don't see that "England" has interfered in the Republic of Ireland's independence in an unreasonable manner in anything like recent history, and certainly not by the 1970s/1980s.

I know it was a reasonable cutoff point. But it didn't show what you wanted it to show. As for unreasonable, that is really opinionated based on your perception. To those who think England interference us bad, it is definably unreasonable. For those others, they side with you. And as I keep saying, this isn't a black and white issue. For everything that you can say X+Y=Z, you have ten thousand variable to make X and Y and Z is sometimes only part of the picture to.

Yes, but the question is, where does an invading population become legitimate? Even accounting for what you said, would it have been reasonable to kick out the protestant (or at least Scottish/English-descended) population of Ulster, say, 100 years ago?

I don't think you can put a static answer to this question. It isn't that there won't be examples that seem clear cut, but you cannot define the reactions of individuals with free will. Now, If it was 400 years, and the conquered party has been equal in the society, I would say they should never revolt. But I don't know what is going through their minds.

If I would have to put something down on record, I would say it would be when no living generation consecutively rejects the idea of the invaders. And what I mean by this is that when you have all generations alive, mom, dad, grandpa, great grandpa and junior who don't reject the invaders and haven't rejected them in their living history, then they might lose they rights to do so in the future. But then we got into second class citizens and taxation without representation and things like that which in my opinion, allows the problems to ignite again. But then again, I'm not talking about the rights people have, I'm talking about the perceptions other people can get. More specifically, an American with only part of the facts that were presented by a specific side. This I how I can understand some of the actions we took and some of the things we didn't do. IT is like that old saying about two sides to every story.

With respect... bullshit. They may have been doing it for political ends (how many terrorist organisations aren't, though?!). However, they most certainly *were* a terrorist organisation- and I didn't see the IRA themselves participating directly in the political process at all.

If one accepts the generally-held belief that Sinn Fein is the political wing of the IRA, then that's a different kettle of fish. However, Sinn Fein themselves deny this to be the case (although most likely for practical reasons, since even if everyone "knows" this to be the case, it would change things completely for them to acknowledge it). And when people talk of the IRA, they generally mean the terrorist side, not Sinn Fein, who aren't the IRA (honest, guv ;-) ).

I think you answered your own statement here. So I won't add anything except that the IRA laundered money they received. It didn't go directly to them, although a lot of the organizations that did take contributions were known to be giving the money to the IRA and hence, raising funds for them, if it was so easy to point to the connections, they why didn't england itself shut them down and lock up their financial transactions. It isn't like it hasn't happened, In the 70's, America froze Iran's international holdings so it wasn't as if it couldn't happen.

I think the answer to this is more likely that it wasn't all that apparent except from an after the fact perspective. Of course the people contributing knew where the funding was going, of course the government's had an idea. But why couldn't they stop it, because they couldn't prove it. I be

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[vegiVamp]

My sincere apologies to the entire island. I did indeed mean 'American'.

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Skype provided a module to the US gov for its encryption and there is a technology sharing agreement with the BKA so whats the real deal ?? i think someone is trying to get scanning technology introduced by a back door . If the BKA has a real wish to break skype real time I have a 16 year old trainee here i could loan them but if so what the heck are the folks in Munich getting paid for and the wages they get!!!! something smells here folks Optus ( a Australian Telco) did a feasability on Skype and found they needed $120000 AUD to provide a COMMERCIAL interception facility ( all encrypted calls) so for police use on targeted figures say 100 people nation wide at one time, say a thousand! its still only a percentage of a commercial National telco setup.

so they need to buy $40 millions worth of technology to intercept calls at the hardware level before its encrypted ( with a technology thats hardware specific for each make and model of phone they are intercepting) one for motorola one for samsung one for nokia one for sagem i think most other phones copy technology from these ( sony ericson is a standalone )

Re:Skype unbreakable?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? you are related to Bin Laden?

I long for the day

[GroeFaZ]

when technology allows brain implants and wireless brain-to-brain communication. Oh joy.

Re:I long for the day

[DiSKiLLeR]

Hmmmm.

That would be nice, but only if our communication was secure with encryption.

Personally, I think its great that skype encrypts everything and think it should be standard with more software.

Re:I long for the day

[MichaelSmith]

when technology allows brain implants and wireless brain-to-brain communication.

Then Governments will want to install spy ware in your brain to listen in on your illegal communications/thoughts. Just make sure you aren't remembering any songs against the wishes of the copyright holders.

Re:I long for the day

[Anonymous Coward]

The brain can already do this in certain (usually) emergency cases and to at least a limited extend without any implants. We just need to learn how to use it better. :)

Re:I long for the day

[QuantumG]

When we have the technology for brain implant communications we will have the technology for brain implant based thought monitoring.. no thanks.

Re:I long for the day

[psmears]

wireless brain-to-brain communication

Isn't that what they used to call "talking"? ;-)

Re:I long for the day

[KiloByte]

In the days of smart phones, I wonder why they bother sending the conversations in the plain, encoded in a way open to the phone company, shared with the guvmint, Russian mafia, and anyone who pays a dime.

I personally hardly use my phone, I don't remember the last time I used it for something else than telling my sister of friend that I'm almost there -- so I don't bother with iPhones or any other $500 bricks. For those who do make more than two calls a month and have one of those super-duper new phones, not using encryption is kind of hard to understand.

Re:I long for the day

[arivanov]

The software to do that and phones that can do that using GPRS/encrypted VOIP has been out for nearly 4 years now. Forgot the name of the phone, some Swiss company was making it.

Re:I long for the day

[KiloByte]

Naturally, it would be strange if no one thought of making such a phone. What bothers me is, no one seems to use encryption. We're swamped with news about latest new and shiny phones, yet there's never a word about a real phone having such a feature. This /. article, for example, talks about Skype which is not available on portable devices -- and even if it was, black-box encryption is worthless. Skype is known to cooperate with China, for example -- so their encryption may be trustworthy enough against Johnny ScriptKiddie listening on a r00ted router, but not much more.

To get the uninterested population use it, encryption would have to be completely transparent. This is easy to do -- GSM connections are nothing but a compressed stream of bits anyway, they don't have to be understandable to pass through the network; if the stream includes a handshake it will be encrypted, if not, it's a talk with a non-compatible phone and will proceed in clear text^H^H^H^Hvoice. Adding key management would be a must for those with a clue about security, but if most users get an alarm if someone's public key changed, this would be a huge plus. Heck, do YOU preseed your ssh known keys? I admit I don't, being vulnerable to a MITM if someone gets me during the first connection.

ssh can replace telnet without a layman user even knowing the difference. If you can do the same with phones, we're golden.

Re:I long for the day

[ultrasound]

Then the DRM will be perfect. Every audio and video source can be directly censored and you won't be able to watch the TV or listen to the radio without the correct NeuroDRM(TM) licence.

Can't wait.

Re:I long for the day

[UbuntuDupe]

Remember? Heck, if history is any judge they'll order automatic "thought-dumps"!

Re:I long for the day

[ajs318]

You don't know for sure that Skype does encrypt anything, at least non-trivially (e.g. EOR with a PRNG stream: it looks secure, but all you really need to know in order to break it is the initial seed for the PRNG), because they won't show you the Source Code. In fact, they seem to put in an extraordinary amount of effort just to keep you from seeing the Source Code.

IAX over a secure tunnel is another matter, however .....

Great

[dalmiroy2k]

Not only Skype gives us free, multiuser lag-free video conference with excellent quality, now we know our conversations are private.
I have nothing to hide, but nothing to share either.

Re:Great

[paulhar]

Assumption: this isn't dis-information designed to make us all feel safer about using Skype's encryption

Re:Great

[Slashidiot]

Just to be extra-safe, I'll be using skype and talking in ROT13.

Re:Great

[Tuoqui]

Best. Comment. Ever.

In this day and age of people reciting the mantra 'If you have nothing to hide' that should become the mantra to respond to it 'I have nothing to share either'

Someone mod the parent up please.

Re:Great

[Scarblac]

As well as, "I have nothing to hide, therefore, you don't need to look."

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, Skype is not trustworthy. Remember what crypotology experts like Bruce Schneier have said about closed protocols and cryptology standards. If it's not open to inspection and peer review, you cannot trust it. And Skype is not just closed: it tries to prevent itself being reverse engineered! Backdoors can easily be added to the program without your knowledge, and no doubt law enforcement agents are already able to set up Skype wiretaps (although perhaps the German police aren't "in" on the secret yet).

So, don't use Skype for anything confidential.

Re:Great

[blackest_k]

I wouldn't trust skype encryption to be secure, after all everyone has the capability of decrypting it with the skype client.
  I can't see how it would be that difficult to monitor traffic through an ISP's gateway. Let alone the POTS system if it leaves the net to a standard phone.

If you want secure communications then really you need some kind of plugin for both ends of the conversation, although voip is lossy so your unlikely to be able to do this with a voice call pidgin on the other hand does give you a couple of options for encrypting your conversations using most IM networks independent of the IM network used.

It would be kind of handy if it could go one stage further and allow you to do the same for file transfer, encrypted ascii codes could be a conversation or they could be files. You could go even further and implement a version of P2P between a select group of friends, automating a number of conversations and scrambling things beyond recognition. send a file to peter to pass over to paul peter wouldnt even need to know whats been sent just who to forward it to.

going back to voice messaging perhaps it isn't that difficult to convert audio into ascii text send via im encrypted and and decrypt it at the other end...

For certain it would be very useful to be able to pass sensitive documents over IM systems. Probably safer than an email with an attachment.

It could be as simple as drag and drop for users, bob needs a spreadsheet from john IM to john he drags the file over to pidgeon up pops the file on bobs desktop.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a plugin to do this already.

Re:Great

[Yvanhoe]

Even weaker assumption : This department of German police has a up-to-date encryption group.

Re:Great

[Tolkien]

Careful, if Skype's encryption is already ROT13'd, you might help the police!

Re:Great

[abigor]

I wouldn't trust skype encryption to be secure, after all everyone has the capability of decrypting it with the skype client.

  I can't see how it would be that difficult to monitor traffic through an ISP's gateway. This is incorrect - Skype uses RSA and symmetric session keys, not a permanently fixed symmetric key. Only the person(s) you want to hear your call will be able to hear it.

There is no way to monitor Skype traffic at the ISP.

You can read an independent security review here: http://www.skype.com/security/files/2005-031%20security%20evaluation.pdf

Re:Great

[blackest_k]

Interesting read, however in section 3 it appears microsofts random number generator is used, isn't this the same generator that was found to be flawed in XP and 2000? Should the appraisal still be valid 2 years after it was written and before the discovery of this flaw.

Brute forcing the account password is limited by a time out after which no more attempts can be made for a while.
However this is a restriction under control of SKYPE and could be lifted by them. Perhaps they can retrieve it anyway.

The real question can SKYPES protocols and encryption methods be overcome by skype themselves? Could SKYPE be forced under the DMCA or other government paper be forced to allow a "tap" to be put in place?
Assuming that isn't the case with the version of the client tested, is there any assurance that a later version will not contain perhaps a government mandated backdoor.

The problem with Skypes security model is that you have to trust Skype and only Skype. If you really want to be comfortably secure then you should be using an encryption before you put your information through someone elses security measures.

We know that traditional telecom providers have to comply with government requests. We also see vonage in big trouble using Sip (and probably open enough for users to bolt on their own security).

Is Skype used by terrorists? we are aware that the USA is tapping regular phone lines and monitoring international traffic, so just why would they not be doing the same with Skype?

I provide no evidence that SKYPE can be insecure, but if it is surely the people charged with protecting national security must be very worried.

Re:Great

[abigor]

The real question can SKYPES protocols and encryption methods be overcome by skype themselves? No. It would require Skype to break RSA/AES. Anyway, voice traffic is not routed through Skype's servers.

The problem with Skypes security model is that you have to trust Skype and only Skype. If you really want to be comfortably secure then you should be using an encryption before you put your information through someone elses security measures. The same could be said for online banking with Internet Explorer, for example. At a certain level of paranoia, doing practically anything useful grinds to a halt. Skype uses an open voice codec (ilbc) and open encryption protocols. Only call setup (i.e. the Skype counterpart to something like SIP) is proprietary.

We know that traditional telecom providers have to comply with government requests. We also see vonage in big trouble using Sip (and probably open enough for users to bolt on their own security). No, SIP is not secure and is deeply flawed for other reasons (hint: SDP).

Is Skype used by terrorists? we are aware that the USA is tapping regular phone lines and monitoring international traffic, so just why would they not be doing the same with Skype? Because they can't break the encryption.

I provide no evidence that SKYPE can be insecure, but if it is surely the people charged with protecting national security must be very worried. That's why strong encryption was classified as a munition by the US for many years.

isn't that the point of encryption?

[petes_PoV]

encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it.

Whether it's the police or just some nosey old git (Q: how can you tell the difference?) who's eavedropping on your conversation, the point is that only the person you're talking to should be able to decrypt the data.

If the police don't like that, that can always try to outlaw it - or require that keys are made available to them.

The problem you get then is people who "spoof" an encrypted datastream by just sending random numbers (tho' not from a Microsoft source as we've recently been told) down the line.
How do you know when a stream of apparently encrypted data has been decoded anyway?

Re:isn't that the point of encryption?

[RSA7474]

I wonder what type of encryption they use? Because if its developed like a public key cryptographic system.. then good luck! Their only real chance of deciphering is that they know the Alice and Bob.. so maybe if they try to review the ciphertext (cipher-speech?) sent between both parties maybe they can decipher it.. such as, maybe each time they talk they start with a "hello" and end on a "goodbye". But that is assuming it can seen this way.. but its really just a stream of 1's and 0's sent over a digital channel.

Re:isn't that the point of encryption?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the police don't like that, that can always try to outlaw it - or require that keys are made available to them.

They're police. They can just get a warrant and setup a bug in the place of interest, or use one of those microphone systems that can sit across the street and listen in by observing the fluctuations in a window.

Sorry, but surveillance shouldn't be easy.

Re:isn't that the point of encryption?

[sid77]

If the police don't like that, that can always try to outlaw it

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir pelcgbtencul.

Re:isn't that the point of encryption?

[Anonymous Coward]

| If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir pelcgbtencul.

Looks like ROT13 has been replaced by Tourettes13, judging by the rude French word in there...

Re:isn't that the point of encryption?

[demallien2]

Actually, that's not so hard. If you try to decrypt an encrypted message using the wrong key, what you get out the other end looks like a randomised byte stream. If instead you see a non-random distribution of bytes, you can be pretty damn sure that you have the right key. The number of false positives from this very simple check is really quite small.

Where you do get into a bit of a mess is when you try to decrypt a compressed data stream, because compression basically tries to remove all predictability from a message - in other words, the message looks to be random. In such a case, a knowledge of the compression algorithm being used (and there aren't that many of them in use today), will quickly enable this to be taken into account.

Re:isn't that the point of encryption?

[abigor]

Skype uses RSA to generate AES ("Rijndael") session keys. So you are entirely correct, "good luck" indeed.

Re:isn't that the point of encryption?

[mojotooth]

"How do you know when a stream of apparently encrypted data has been decoded anyway?"

Well, in this case it's an audio stream. So if, after decrypting, the voices sound like the teachers in a Charlie Brown movie, then you probably haven't actually decoded it.

Re:isn't that the point of encryption?

[cpghost]

If the police don't like that, that can always try to outlaw it - or require that keys are made available to them.

If crypto is outlawed, communications will be hidden in spam. Let's see: can we coin a word for it? Steganography... spamenography... steganospam...?

Good Police Work

[hanssprudel]

This is a good thing. Having to install monitoring at the source or destination means an operation that requires effort and, hopefully, a court order. This means that their is judicial oversight, and that to catch criminals police have to do, you know, police work rather than just sitting around spying on us.

Ubiquitous encryption does not make law enforcement impossible. It just makes indiscriminate law enforcement impossible.

Re:Good Police Work

[Thanshin]

Ubiquitous encryption does not make law enforcement impossible. It just makes indiscriminate law enforcement impossible. Ubiquitous encryption does make law enforcement harder. So it's just a matter of how much you value security versus privacy.

The path of least resistance steps over the citizens rights.

Re:Good Police Work

[Fred_A]

Ubiquitous encryption does make law enforcement harder. So it's just a matter of how much you value security versus privacy. What security ?
I'm not threatened by people using encryption since I don't own Big Media (tm) shares.

And as for "evil people", whether they have crypto freely available or not doesn't change anything. Good crypto is available everywhere already. Whether it's outlawed or not people will still use it. Should it vanish overnight for some reason, there are alternatives (one time pads, courriers, etc.).

All of the various hysterical measures taken in the recent years have presumably had marginal effect on security.
Except that a lot of people feel less safe from their police with its increased powers nowadays.

Re:Good Police Work

[zazzel]

It's not as much as good thing as it seems. Ziercke argues for the right to install spyware through a tool called "remote forensic software" - a government trojan!

Re:Good Police Work

[Thanshin]

Well, you value more a lot of lost privacy than a little more security.

We agree, but it's clear that some people value more the little security than the loss of privacy. Usually when it's their security and our privacy.

Re:Good Police Work

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it should require a much stronger case to get the court order to justify something like that than a normal wire-tap.

As such overview is unlikely, I'd generally be against it entirely...

Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Noryungi]

According to this PDF document, Skype encryption is based on open standard (such as AES, SHA-1, etc).

According to this article, our good friends at the NSA "may" have put backdoors in some of the technologies that could be used by Skype.

And, then, according to this other article, it does not matter what technologies you use, if your CPU is wide open to analysis and crypto attacks.

And, of course, there is the question of using a 'secure' communication system on a completely insecure operating system, such as Windows. Why do you think they talk of intercepting the communication before it becomes encrypted? Probably because the vast majority of suspects use Windows. Using Linux, or MacOS, would not be much of an improvement either.

Conclusion? Well, the Bundespolizei (that's German police to you) may not have the means to decipher your skype communications right now. But it's getting there, thank yo uvery much. And there are agencies out there who certainly can, and will.

And what happened to free german crypto? I thought Germany had the only sane policy about crypto in the industrial world?

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[RSA7474]

Lq prylhw uyvvld wkh mrolfh ghflskhu vrx! Hint: Caesar

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[SerpentMage]

Yeah I think they can't break the encryption, and not because they can't break the encryption itself. But if you read the article look at what it says.

>> Experts say Skype and other Voice over internet Protocol (VoIP) calling software are difficult to intercept because they work by breaking up voice data into small packets and switching them along thousands of router paths instead of a constant circuit between two parties, as with a traditional call.

That's the real problem. The packets are scattered all over the place and they can get a lock on the data. They probably can break the encryption but then they would only get piecemeal information sort like, "Plan " ... " meet " .... " blow " ... " place "... Which could mean "Plan A is to meet tomorrow and blow the place beside the train station... " OR "Plan to meet tomorrow at the new pub, and blow the old place like a pop stand." Same missing words, two entirely different meanings...

Interesting... You could develop an encryption where fifteen people talk and give pieces of the sentence and the meaning is only apparent when you piece everything together....

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Nursie]

"According to this article, our good friends at the NSA "may" have put backdoors in some of the technologies that could be used by Skype."

Roll your own, use a publicly available AES implementation, or Rijndael's original cipher. Also, the NSA aren't quite as clever as you think. Pretty good I'm sure, but the level of paranoia about them is nuts.

"And, then, according to this other article, it does not matter what technologies you use, if your CPU is wide open to analysis and crypto attacks."

Got any further details on that one? Sounds really interesting and I'd quite like to read the theory in more depth.

"And, of course, there is the question of using a 'secure' communication system on a completely insecure operating system, such as Windows."

There's no reason at all not to be able to do secure comms on windows. And if it's behind NAT then there's no reason that it should be compromised either. Any OS surely has the capability to intercept and record audio from the sound card, but will present different difficulties in gaining access and/or installing the software.

"the Bundespolizei (that's German police to you) may not have the means to decipher your skype communications right now. But it's getting there, thank yo uvery much"

I would dispute this. Unless they can come into your house and gain physical access to your PC whilst you're out.

"And there are agencies out there who certainly can, and will."

I don't think so.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Noryungi]

It does not matter if the communication is encrypted and broken down into packets if all that is needed is to intercept the complete communication at one (or both) ends. Under Windows, this can probably be accomplished trivially, since most apps run with administrator privileges under most Windows machines. And, running as a Windows administrator, Skype will alter your firewall configuration. Ooops.

What's more, most Internet packets these days pass through one of the MAE. And guess what? Most telecom companies who run the MAEs have agreed to cooperate with the NSA, including to the point they have built special facilities to allow NSA specialists to install eavesdropping equipment right there.

Finally, if you can intercept let's say 70% of a Skype communication, you probably have enough to determine if Alice and Bob should be put under further surveillance... Or maybe to disrupt their "nefarious" plans.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Alphager]

Conclusion? Well, the Bundespolizei (that's German police to you) Just nitpicking:
Police in Germany is split between federal and state-police. The states all have LKAs (Landes-Kriminal-Amt), the federal state has the BKA (Bundes-Kriminal-Amt) and the Bundespolizei.
The BKA is responsible for all inter-state crimes and the protection of german politicians. The Bundespolizei is responsible for securing the (nowadays non-existant) borders and Airports&Railways.


Ziercke (the man talking in the article) is head of the BKA.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Anonymous Coward]

Roll your own

but only if you want people to be able to spy on you.
 
 

use a publicly available AES implementation

And you are giving that suggestion to people who are so paranoid that they think NSA have put backdoors in AES.
 
 

or Rijndael's original cipher.

Which is in fact identical to AES. Except that the original supported more different block sizes.

Of course the entire idea that there is a backdoor in the cipher is absurd. In every single aspect of the cipher it was designed not to leave any freedoms that could be used to put a backdoor in it.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Noryungi]

"According to this article, our good friends at the NSA "may" have put backdoors in some of the technologies that could be used by Skype."

Roll your own, use a publicly available AES implementation, or Rijndael's original cipher. Also, the NSA aren't quite as clever as you think. Pretty good I'm sure, but the level of paranoia about them is nuts.

They are clever enough to introduce trapdoors in something most people never even think of checking. Why? Because they understand the game: in crypto, it does not matter if your software is iron-clad if your random number generator has been compromised. And so on and so forth, all the way down to the bare metal.

Don't underestimate these guys: they have been working on that kind of problem for the past fifty years. Their British counterparts at GCHQ invented public key crypto several years before everybody else. They eat, drink, breathe, and smoke crypto and all kinds of telecom all day long because they are paid to do that. And their research budget is several times the budget of a small country. Paranoid? Sure, call me paranoid if you want, but if there is one organization that would be able to pull it off, it's NSA. And no, they are not interested in your privacy.

There's no reason at all not to be able to do secure comms on windows. And if it's behind NAT then there's no reason that it should be compromised either. Any OS surely has the capability to intercept and record audio from the sound card, but will present different difficulties in gaining access and/or installing the software.

Oh, please. Windows can be cracked, and has been cracked, simply by pointing at a compromised web page. Automated software installation -- totally transparent and invisible to the user -- is trivial. Do a google search on "worm" or "Storm worm" for the latest example. And don't get me started on NAT.

"the Bundespolizei (that's German police to you) may not have the means to decipher your skype communications right now. But it's getting there, thank you very much"

I would dispute this. Unless they can come into your house and gain physical access to your PC whilst you're out.

They don't even need to gain physical access. If they can trick you to a web page that contains a trojan, you are dead meat. Period.

"And there are agencies out there who certainly can, and will."

I don't think so.

You haven't been paying attention to the news, lately, haven't you?

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Nursie]

"Which is in fact identical to AES. Except that the original supported more different block sizes."

Oh I know, I just thought maybe the paranoid types might trust the cipher as issued by an academic rather than the one the US government eventually issued and accepted as AES!

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Dunbal]

I was thinking more along the lines of:

"Yeah we went to the Planetarium, she's a real meat eater. That night she gave me a blow-job back at my place!"

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Nursie]

"Oh, please. Windows can be cracked, and has been cracked, simply by pointing at a compromised web page."

Yes, and you have to get me to do that. If I'm a terrorist that's concerned about my privacy, I'm not going to be visiting any websites that I get spammed with, and I'm most likely not using IE either.

"You haven't been paying attention to the news, lately, haven't you?"

Do enlighten me, I know the british government are trying to squeeze keys out of people who may not have them, but otherwise...

They are clever enough to introduce trapdoors in something most people never even think of checking. Why? Because they understand the game: in crypto, it does not matter if your software is iron-clad if your random number generator has been compromised. And so on and so forth, all the way down to the bare metal.

I have no doubt that they're good. I have a lot of doubts that there's much they can do against modern crypto. And the bare metal is not as important as you think. Back to AES - so long as your machine, whatever it is, isn't compromised and it can do the calculations correctly, you're safe. if you have shared the key with your correspondant in a secure (offline) way, and used a reasonable cipher feedback mode then there's not a single thing they can do if all they have is the data transmitted back and forth.

Sorry, I'm sure they are good, but the extreme reverence for these people is unwarranted.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[deroby]

WOOHOOOHOOO, I'm sooo scared now.

So what if Skype alters my Firewall settings : I 've strictly allowed it do do so !
(Tools Menu, Options, Advanced, Connection, [v] Allow Skype to modify my firewall settings)

Maybe the setting is on by default, not sure, but if it makes my Skype-experience any better, I don't see why I we have to 'create panic' like this ...
If you don't want any open ports, then don't install software that needs it in the first place, period.

Sigh.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Anonymous Coward]

I would dispute this. Unless they can come into your house and gain physical access to your PC whilst you're out.

When this was hot news in Germany the first thing that happened where Linux Live CDs with Skype preinstalled. This way it doesn't matter whether the OS on your hard disc is bugged.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[msormune]

It does not help the attacker at all if he/she knows the encryption is based on those standards.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[should_be_linear]

Whoa? .... Shit! They just destroyed the grand ingenious plan to save Free World (tm) from Win32-API-based terrorist organizations. Well, there is still hope that Live CDs, Skype and Linux could become illegal too.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this PDF document, Skype encryption is based on open standard (such as AES, SHA-1, etc).

According to this article, our good friends at the NSA "may" have put backdoors in some of the technologies that could be used by Skype.

You don't *need* a backdoor in AES to break Skype. Because Skype's security is more than just AES: it's key management and protocol handling and lots of other crap. *That* is where the backdoor will be.

Don't forget - a backdoor in AES could also be used by the Chinese version of the NSA. It doesn't make sense to deliberately cripple AES with a backdoor because that would ultimately defeat the purpose of using AES in the first place: to keep commercial secrets from criminals and foreign powers. It's much better to put a backdoor in the OS or applications of interest, because that backdoor can be protected against use by others.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Rulke]

Seeing how police does get their sniffer traffic delivered to them by the ISP's and you are not likely to switch to another one in mid-sentence, i think you are on the wrong track :) All in all this Bundestrojaner is a stupid idea, either someone doesn't need to hide their online activities and tapping it is no challenge or they need to and know how to do it, meaning they regularly switch computers, change keys for their encryption, scan the computers they use for abnormal behavior and so on... meaning they police is right where they started and still reliant of the time proven methods.

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[Anonymous Coward]

QCLWY JFBRM IMZCS LBVPM JYOOC IIFMR. Hint: Vigenère

(Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.)

Re:Plenty of attacks left, thank you very much

[maxwell demon]

Indeed. If the original cipher supported more block sizes, then the paranoid type could conclude that the standard only contains those block sizes the NSA found vulnerable, and excludes the truly secure ones. Thus the paranoid would feel safer using those block sizes which didn't make it into the standard.

Of course the trusting type would argue the other way round: The other block sizes might have been excluded because they were found not to be secure (but without telling so, because the enemy shouldn't be warned about which sizes not to use).

yes, it's not rot13

[borkee]

and german police is not alan turing, obviously

Re:yes, it's not rot13

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, there is no way to prove they are human?

Re:yes, it's not rot13

[definate]

Tell me more about Alan Touring?

Don't throw me in dat dere briar patch!

[fishdan]

We cannot break Skype encryption, and we have publicly announced that, so it's perfectly safe for you to keep on using it! Really!

Re:Don't throw me in dat dere briar patch!

[ms1234]

This is exactly what I would proclaim if I was able to decrypt the traffic and want users to think that I couldn't. Maybe not all whatever terrorists would fall for this but some would.

Re:Don't throw me in dat dere briar patch!

[grand_it]

We cannot break Skype encryption, and we have publicly announced that, so it's perfectly safe for you to keep on using it! Really!

Perhaps, it's the other way around: we broke Skype encryption, but publicly announce otherwise, so you'll keep on using it with misplaced trust.

Re:Don't throw me in dat dere briar patch!

[Anonymous Coward]

...........

Wow. Speechless.

Re:Don't throw me in dat dere briar patch!

[Fzz]

This is exactly what I would proclaim if I was able to decrypt the traffic and want users to think that I couldn't. Maybe not all whatever terrorists would fall for this but some would.

But then again, maybe they're smarter than this. Maybe they really can't break it. But they want you to think they can break it, so they tell you they can't, because they know terrorists (and slashdotters) always expect the government to try and mislead them. Great way to undermine confidence in Skype in circles of suspicious users, without causing problems for the regular users. You obviously fell for it :-)

Re:Don't throw me in dat dere briar patch!

[The Evil Couch]

JUBBFU! --Decrypt that for an important message about the grandparent post.

Re:Don't throw me in dat dere briar patch!

[tkw954]

This is exactly what I would proclaim if I was able to decrypt the traffic and want users to think that I couldn't. Maybe not all whatever terrorists would fall for this but some would.

But then again, maybe they're smarter than this. Maybe they really can't break it. But they want you to think they can break it, so they tell you they can't, because they know terrorists (and slashdotters) always expect the government to try and mislead them. Great way to undermine confidence in Skype in circles of suspicious users, without causing problems for the regular users. You obviously fell for it :-)

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The first is never get involved in a land war in Asia. The second, only slightly less well known, is this: never go up against a German when encryption is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha -- thud

Re:Don't throw me in dat dere briar patch!

[Alsee]

Fzz(153115) works for the German police.

Or maybe it's Alsee(515537) that works for the German police.

-

Intellectually surpassed?

[Thanshin]

Encryption is about 4500 years old.

They enjoyed a short time of easy wiretapping and now we are back in an environment of secure communications. Well, tough luck, laws that infringe the privacy of your population can't help you now.

You can always cry "HAX" or call the waaambulance, I suppose.

Thats why I use skype

[XavidX]

I use skype because of the encryption. Its fast too. And sending files is quick as well even if i am behind a firewall. Unlike other messanger services I know of.

Re:Thats why I use skype

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't work for the British Government benefit agency then?

Snatch 2007

[moro_666]

couldn't resist. this is just so "snatch" :

Turkish: F*ck me, hold tight. What's that?
Tommy: It's me belt, Turkish.
Turkish: No, Tommy. There's a Skype in your trousers. What's a Skype doing in your trousers?
Tommy: It's for protection.
Turkish: Protection from what? "Zee Germans"? ;-)

It's all about building trust..

[OlivierB]

Oh noes, the police can't decipher Skype! We're all gonna die!
Yeah right.
If you are paying attention, Skype is incorporated in Luxembourg, which is part of the EU, just like Germany (they actually share borders).
Do you think the EU would allow for some European company to provide tools to "terrorists" without having eavesdropping ability?

Now for the real story; German Police is putting on a little show so people actually trust *more* the closed-source Skype software.

If the German Police had no way of eavesdropping they would either (a) Shut up about it or (b) Actually say they have supercomputers that can decipher anything (even if this is not true). (a) or (b) would create enough FUD for "terrorists" to actually distrust Skype as a communication medium.

This is all spin doctor speak, and I would never trust Skype for sensitivie material communications. The Zfone project http://zfoneproject.com/ is a much more secure system.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[Anonymous Coward]

Now for the real story; German Police is putting on a little show so people actually trust *more* the closed-source Skype software.

If the German Police had no way of eavesdropping they would either (a) Shut up about it or (b) Actually say they have supercomputers that can decipher anything (even if this is not true). (a) or (b) would create enough FUD for "terrorists" to actually distrust Skype as a communication medium.

That is what they want you to think. It must be a double bluff, they want you to think that they want you to think it is secure so you will stop using it because they are actually not able to decrypt it.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[Njovich]

If you are paying attention, Skype is incorporated in Luxembourg, which is part of the EU, just like Germany (they actually share borders).
Do you think the EU would allow for some European company to provide tools to "terrorists" without having eavesdropping ability?

Yes.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they're putting on a little show so they can get public support for their online surveillance/trojan horse program. We actually get this and similar crap around once per week in our media.

In fact a few weeks ago a technical article appeared that suggested that there could already be a cooperation between the German federal police and Skype.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[Sam Lowry]

Skype has actually dedicated people for being points of contacts of the investigating bodies in their Luxembourg offices.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[Anonymous Coward]

Aha, but that's what they WANT you to think! See, they REALLY cannot break Skype encryption, so in order to make sure that people don't use it, they launch a story about how they're unable to break it, leading everyone to conclude that they, in fact, are able to and just want to lull you into a false sense of security - so that in the end, you won't use it, which is just what they wanted all along.

Brilliant, isn't it!

Re:It's all about building trust..

[Yvanhoe]

Seconded. But That doesn't mean that I would trust Skype to have any concern about privacy...

Re:It's all about building trust..

[Spyrus]

Politics and legalities aside, I also suspect this is a little show. The authorities in the USA did a similar thing with the Nextel "push-to-talk" technology. For a while, it was true that they couldn't intercept and listen to these types of calls. The "bad guys" caught on to this and exploited it. Before long, law enforcement WAS able to listen in and those using Nextel PTT with a false sense of security got careless. I suspect that if the police are openly talking to the media about Skype this way, it's a similar situation.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[Tom]

Do you think the EU would allow for some European company to provide tools to "terrorists" without having eavesdropping ability? As a matter of fact, yes. Totalitarian police states fell out of favour here twice - once around 1945 and then again in the 90s. The remaining wannabe-dictators are right now importing as much as they can from the USA, but we're not quite there, yet. Especially regarding cryptography, Europe has always been more open than the US.

That doesn't mean I can guarantee there's no backdoor in Skype, but I wouldn't wager any high bets one way or the other.

You are falsely assuming that the police is some kind of super-intelligent spin-doctoring agency. It isn't. They've got their problems, blunders and idiots, just like everyone else. I'll follow Ockham's razor and say "if everything looks like some idiot opened his mouth instead of thinking a bit first, then very likely that's exactly what happened."

Re:It's all about building trust..

[base3]

Especially regarding cryptography, Europe has always been more open than the US. Really?

• UK - Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
• FR - Outright ban of civilian use of strong encryption
• DE - Data Retention Law

Re:It's all about building trust..

[berkus]

Made me laugh out loud. Shameless plug?

I'm sure that Chat-o-rama made by ACME Software is much more secure system, because it is produced in a totally free Mars colony!

Re:It's all about building trust..

[madcow_bg]

(a) or (b) would create enough FUD for "terrorists" to actually distrust Skype as a communication medium. Don't worry, if it is good enough for the terrorists, it ought to be good enough for me.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[nr1]

What does the Data Retention Law have to do with crypto?

Re:It's all about building trust..

[base3]

You're right, it doesn't, directly. But consider that data are retained and all yours are encrypted, sticking out like the a high weed in a freshly manicured lawn. Who do you think gets priority in the dragnet for up close scrutiny? Given that TPTB assume that ordinary people using encryption outside of electronic banking or (shudder) web-based voting have "something to hide," the next logical step to data retention laws is to pass further laws against "circumventing" the data retention by using non-escrowed encryption.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[nr1]

I still don't see how this is relevant. The data to be retained are the "call detail records", e.g. time, source, destination for phone calls, login/logout times and assigned IP address for Internet connections.

The actual content of the communication is explicitly not included, including whether this communication is encrypted.

Note that this data has usually been available anyway, e.g. for billing, but before, the telcos were not legally required to retain it for a fixed time period.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[base3]

What use are "call detail records" of a session obfuscated through TOR? I stand by my point that the data retention act is reflective of a lack of "openness" in Europe, refuting the OP's assertion that Europe is particularly open with respect to encryption. Also, whether or not the communication is encrypted can often be inferred from the protocol used (the most trivial example being HTTPS). Never was "call detail" of what sites a person visited needed for billing purposes, so I don't know what relevance that has.

Re:It's all about building trust..

[nr1]

I should have phrased this more clearly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_detail_record

For internet connections only your login information to the telecom network is retained (at least, that is how I understand the law). What you do during your connection is not retained.
TOR obviously has nothing to do with this, as you only start a connection to TOR after you actually logged in to your DSL line.

(Ignoring now the provisions in the law regarding Email and VOIP, which can be circumvented by simply consuming such services from another country)

Re:It's all about building trust..

[base3]

We were definitely using different meanings for call detail, I see, thanks. If indeed the retention were only of the connection to the ISP itself, that would be fairly innocuous. But this seems to indicate retention of much more detail than that (although they don't refer to it as call detail).

Re:It's all about building trust..

[nr1]

Here is the text of the actual EU Directive:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2006/l_105/l_10520060413en00540063.pdf
The interesting part for this discussion is Article 5 - Categories of data to be retained (starting on page 4)

Note that member nations can go further than the Directive, when implementing it into national law.

Is this a suprise?

[telchine]

Is this at all suprising? It's the police, they're hardly high-tech. I wouldn't be suprised if they couldn't get into a PKzip passworded archive. ROT-13 would certainly baffle them.

Now, if it were the security services that couldn't get in, that would be more suprising.

From someone on the list

[Eythian]

This was mentioned on cypherpunks today, a reply was:

Caveat: Ziercke is a notorious liar and surveillance apologist.

Take that for what it's worth - I can't back it up nor disprove it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Getting Through the Encryption Not the Story

[segedunum]

Getting through the encryption is not the story here. What they want to do is this:

"There are no discussions with Skype. I don't think that would help," he said, adding that he did not want to harm the competitiveness of any company. "I don't think that any provider would go for that."

If you are talking about getting to data after encryption, or before, why wouldn't you talk to Skype?

Ziercke said there was a vital need for German law enforcement agencies to have the ability to conduct on-line searches of computer hard drives of suspected terrorists using "Trojan horse" spyware.

This is completely unrelated to being able to tap encrypted communications. This is on a whole different level, and contravenes many laws brought into many countries for spyware and data protection.

These searches are especially important in cases where the suspects are aware that their internet traffic and phone calls may be monitored[?????!!!!!!] and choose to store sensitive information directly on their hard drives without emailing it.

God only knows what this means.

Ziercke said worries were overblown and that on-line searches would need to be conducted only on rare occasions.

How would they propose to do this, and get 'software' installed undetected?

"We currently have 230 proceedings related to suspected Islamists," Ziercke said. "I can imagine that in two or three of those we would like to do this."

Well, being an Islamist or belonging to some other group is not a crime, and I dare say if you searched many peopless hard drives for stuff about bombs and explosives then you could find something. That doesn't mean that they're going to do anything.

This is yet another old and decrepit security services organisation, worried about its future, worried about its funding, people who are worried about their jobs and worried about its place in the world.

Re:Getting Through the Encryption Not the Story

[bhima]

"Islamist" is newspeak for a militant extremist Muslim. In my mind, because it lacks militant or extremist, it is double plus ungood.

I hear it on the English language news broadcast in Austria / Germany all the time. Don't they use it in the US?

Re:Getting Through the Encryption Not the Story

[philipp-de]

These searches are especially important in cases where the suspects are aware that their internet traffic and phone calls may be monitored[?????!!!!!!] and choose to store sensitive information directly on their hard drives without emailing it. What he means by this, is: The Bundespolizei (like FBI in the US) , whose president mr ziercke is, seeks to get a bill passed by the government rulingt that: - Calls you make on the telephone get registered (your number, destination number, time) - Every Request to the internet gets registered (your IP, destination IP, time) for 6 months. And, of course, potential criminals would be "aware" if such a measure would come into effect.

Re:Getting Through the Encryption Not the Story

[Silverlock]

Maybe the meaning is being warped, but I have only heard the term "Islamist" as referring to people who want Islamic government. Those people may be terrorists, or they may be a legitimate political party.

In fact, according to the wikipedia article, "Islamism (Arabic: al-'islmiyya) is a term that is usually used to denote a set of political ideologies holding that Islam is not only a religion but also a political system and its teachings should be preeminent in all facets of society."

Re:Getting Through the Encryption Not the Story

[duffbeer703]

US news outlets are still pushing the PC view.

Re:Getting Through the Encryption Not the Story

[nr1]

Ziercke said there was a vital need for German law enforcement agencies to have the ability to conduct on-line searches of computer hard drives of suspected terrorists using "Trojan horse" spyware.

This is completely unrelated to being able to tap encrypted communications. This is on a whole different level, and contravenes many laws brought into many countries for spyware and data protection. I think the crypto issue is really at the heart of the whole "online search" debate. With the increasing use of full hard disk encryption, traditional methods of physically seizing computers and doing an offline forensic analysis fail. If you read the press coverage between the lines and listen to statements by some of the officials, who actually seem to know what they are talking about, this seems to be the major reason for this push.

Skype

[Ethanol-fueled]

Skype can break firewalls. Don't y'all read slashdot?

well derrrrrr

[yoshi3]

It's the whole friggin point of the encrytion innit? If they need to listen in on crimminals skype calls why can't they make some sort of agreement with skype?

Really?

[pr0nbot]

Maybe they're clever, and they can in fact decrypt it, but they want you to think they can't?

See if they can decypher this

[houghi]

John has a large moustache. I repeat: John has a large moustache.

Re:See if they can decypher this

[Anonymous Coward]

Got it.
A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal.

Re:See if they can decypher this

[Thanshin]

After you activate the comb only cutting the bread cable will deactivate it.

Remember to tell John that the buns and the comb are in the brain station's locker. The code is the century of your birthday, twice.

Re:See if they can decypher this

[Anonymous Coward]

A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákkal.

Your hovercraft is full of eels? What the hell does THAT mean??

Re:See if they can decypher this

[Mr Jazzizle]

His sideburns, however, are cleanly shaven.

Suspicious Minds

[LordMidge]

The first thing I though was if I could hack a telephone system out of many what would I do?
Tell everyone I can't and get as many people using that system so that I can listen in onto as many as possible.
I'll go put my tinfoil hat on again now.

creators' planet/population rescue kode is...

[Anonymous Coward]

freely available. plus, there's never any payper liesense subscription fees, no cover charge & no encryption required. just pay attention, which is cost effective, & lessens the chances for further corepirate nazi bushwhackings. does anyone recall who hitler's favorite 'enemy' was? hint: it was 'terrorists'.

meanwhile, trying to stay 'in tune' with a declining greed/fear/ego based aspect of man'kind' can be somewhat discouraging, as certain LIEforms continue to claim 'ownership'/control of people/things, in spite of the fact that all we have/are is a gift from yOUR creators. so what is a 'fair' day's pay?

micro management (by use of deception, detainment & media control/censorship) of entire populations has never worked (for very long). it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster.

we're intending for the nazis to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather'.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying
&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv&oi=property_suggestions&resnum=0&ct=property-revision&cd=1

the creators will prevail. as it has always been.

corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7

as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption.

fortunately there's an 'army' of angels, coming yOUR way

do not be afraid/dismayed, it is the way it was meant to be.

the little ones/innocents must/will be protected.

after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit?

for each of the creators' innocents harmed (in ANY way), there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available.

beware the illusionary smoke&mirrors.con

all is not lost/forgotten.

no need to fret (unless you're associated/joined at the hype with, unprecedented evile), it's all just a part of the creators' wwwildly popular, newclear powered, planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.

or, is it (literally) ground hog day, again? many of US are obviously not interested in how we appear (which is whoreabull) from the other side of the 'lens', or even from across the oceans.

vote with (what's left in) yOUR wallet. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi glowbull warmongering execrable.

we still haven't read (here) about the 2/3'rds of you kids who are investigating/pursuing a spiritual/conscience/concious re-awakening, in amongst the 'stuff that matters'? another big surprise?

some of US should consider ourselves very fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.

it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc....

as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis.

concern about the course of events that will occur should the life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order.

'do not be dismayed' (also from the manual). however, it's ok/recommended, to not attempt to live under/accept, fauxking nazi felon greed/fear/ego based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys.

consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?

"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."

take it with a grain of salt ...

[Lazy Jones]

it's very likely that they can decrypt it or that they have access to some backdoor in Skype ... In other interviews (or other cited versions of the same?), Ziercke said that they hadn't talked to Skype yet about access to a backdoor.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Smells like BS to me

[DrXym]

Even assuming the crypto is perfect, the police would still be able to infer a lot from who is calling who. A terrorist communicating with another terrorist, shows they know each other, where they are in the world, what their calling routines are (frequency, time, who they call next), the length of conversation and so on. They might even be able to infer who is doing the most talking from the amount of traffic in each direction. All without knowing the actual conversation text.

And that assumes the crypto is perfect and the police / intelligence services are incapable of decrypting it, playing man in the middle, or failing that installing a trojan, or planting a bug, or listening through a wall or whatever.

It sounds like BS. Even perfect crypto gives them more information that they had to begin with. It sounds like they want to have their cake and eat it too.

Re:Smells like BS to me

[Whacky]

The Skype uses AES mind u its the most secured one among all the other encryptions available.. its would take them a long time to decode it.. :D

All Hail the Nanny State!

[Eggplant62]

The Nanny State knows better than I do how to take care of me. I need the Nanny State in order to properly function as a responsible adult. Without the Nanny State telling me what to do, how am I to know what is right and what is wrong? It's just like having an extension of my Mommy and Daddy around for the rest of my life! I feel SO COMFORTABLE!

This message brought to you by the letters A and Q and the number 5. "A" stands for absurd.

Additionally

[philipp-de]

The Federal Court at the moment trials to other laws recently made by our governmnet: - So called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" - That is everytime you connect to an internet Server or Call some number on the telephone it gets registered what server you did connect, what number you've called and how long the connection lasted. This data shall be saved for 6 months, according to the new law. - Mass scanning of car numbers through camera systems at the roadside by the police. Police claims the scanned numbers are not stored , but rather being matched against a database of known fugitives. But some doubt definitely remains here. Both laws were heavily and partly critically questioned by the Judges at the Federal Court ("Bundesverfassungsgericht") at the oral proceedings. Those judges also have a long standing history of invalidating laws that would take government power too far.

Surely reporting this is counter productive

[pancakegeels]

unless you just bought shares in Skype and are trying to break the as-yet untapped terrorist market.

Lost in Translation

[DancesWithBlowTorch]

That's a translation problem. The agency in question here is the "Verfassungsschutz" (meaning, ironically, "Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution"), which is the German Version of the NSA (not that this name is any better). The submitter just couldn't be bothered to go through all that hassle and called it "the police".

Now, while the VS certainly doesn't have the means of the NSA, it is indeed a rather sophisticated service, and I am entirely convinced it is not beyond their means to employ really good security experts.

Re:Lost in Translation

[Alphager]

That's a translation problem. The agency in question here is the "Verfassungsschutz" (meaning, ironically, "Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution"), which is the German Version of the NSA (not that this name is any better). The submitter just couldn't be bothered to go through all that hassle and called it "the police".

Now, while the VS certainly doesn't have the means of the NSA, it is indeed a rather sophisticated service, and I am entirely convinced it is not beyond their means to employ really good security experts. Nope, Ziercke is President of the BKA, the Bundeskriminalamt. That's the federal equivalent of the LKA aka Landeskriminalamt aka Police.

Re:Lost in Translation

[nr1]

This is not really correct. The Verfassungsschutz is Germany's interior intelligence agency, so would be most comparable to the British MI5 and some of the tasks of the FBI. The NSA, on the other hand, is tasked with protection of the criticial communications infrastructure, as well as worldwide electronic signals intelligence (e.g. Echelon). In Germany, this is covered by the BSI (Federal Agency for IT Security - protection of infrastructure) and the BND (exterior intelligence agency - SigInt).

I'm concerned about my uncles dog.

[forgoil]

Are they really thinking that they can thwart terrorists and such with this kind of surveillance? Any nonsense sentence can be a code to act, it's been used for ages. The idea of the intelligence organization sitting in cubicles and spying from a chair is bound to fail, and has failed many times over. So this is both useless, and effectively is spying on a countries citizens. This is what Stasi did, this is classic KGB, it smells of Gestapo, is this what we call freedom? Privacy is more important than it has ever been, and we will fight for it, and declaring war on your own people because they want their privacy is just as bad as the terrorists and the mafia.

Tech Savvy terrorists

[nfractal]

The possibility of terrorists using skype is there yes, but right now according to most police forces IMHO is increasingly through use and throw sim cards over plain vanilla cellular networks.

And without any encryption to boot, most conversations are phrases within local dialects which listed out would mean anything from a shopping list to a planned assasination. The point here is rather than spying on the content its the point of origin and the investigative techniques used by most third world countries today that'll help. And definitely not the backdoors left in most protocols used by skype et. all by all the three letter agencies.

The type of curbs being tried by the German Police would essentially be useful against big time money laundering and crimes similar in vein.

Idiots, Skype decrypts calls for all authorities!

[barwasp]

Skype is a telecommunications company and for having their teleoperator license required to allow wiretaps for law enforcement purposes - so it works also in USA. Or do you thing that USA would just allow osama bin laden to host conference calls with wannabe terrorists using Skype. In fact Skype clearly admits that they decrypt the calls for all requesting authorities.

Kurt Sauer, Skype's chief security officer, said there are no "back doors" that could let a government bypass the encryption on a call. At the same time, he said Skype "cooperates fully with all lawful requests from relevant authorities." He would not give particulars on the type of support provided. The german police just wants to install trojan horses for monitoring the germans. If the polizei were really after those encrypted skype calls they would just sue skype, and not be whining their lack of skills in public.

Godwin!

[cloakable]

Damn, not even one post, and this article has been Godwined!

From the tags: nazis. Sorry people, this discussion is now invalid, move along.

Re:Godwin!

[dave420]

Godwin is for kids, sorry.

Re:Godwin!

[maxwell demon]

Indeed, adults use Devillose's law instead.

Someone call Bletchley Park...

[RealGrouchy]

It looks like the Germans have encountered a bit of an enigma...

- RG>

Mod Parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

"...This is yet another old and decrepit security services organisation, worried about its future, worried about its funding, people who are worried about their jobs and worried about its place in the world...."

Few people realise that this is what lies at the heart of the appalling mess western society is now in.

The Security Services lead, but the whole cold war infrastructure follows. In the Western world we have been brought up to expect and resist an external military threat since the 1930s - there is a huge amount of impetus there. That is why they are generating new threats as we speak - it's the only way they know how to live...

The answer is: illegal wiretapping!

[VincenzoRomano]

When the Police or a Judge needs to wiretap phone conversations, they ask the telecom companies to provide them with a "plug" with unscrambled and unencrypted traffic. Every communication company is to comply with this law, at least in United Europe.
This happens for landline, GSM and sat phone calls. And should also happen for Skype-like calls.
If the Police is trying to do it the hard way, well, I fear they are trying to do something illegal!
Or maybe they are trying to make people sure that Skype is unbreakable, while it is not.
You can bet that somewhere in the Skype system the conversations are clear text. That's the right place you can push your plug to wiretap!

What can we do?

[Anonymous Coward]

What can we do to stop this american practice of supporting terrorism and coups against other nations?

What will make you americans stop these atrocities?

Should we return the favor?

err...

[Tom]

The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it. Yes, that's why they call it encryption, you know? That's the purpose of it. Because, you know, if you can decrypt it, so can every other clueless fool.

Skype encryption at least partially broken

[Anonymous Coward]

According to work done by EADS employees (http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf), Skype encryption is (at least partially) broken and Skype conversion can be decyphered. They even present means to route Skype traffic through arbitrary hosts, something which is also done with Tor traffic. So if the police *really* wants to eavesdrop on Skype traffic, they have all the means necessary to do so. I also suspect them the lay ground for the Bundestrojaner.

There's something very wrong with this article

[DeanFox]

Germany's top police officer said.
Who is this guy and how "top" is he? Because either he doesn't know what he's talking about or this announcement is a distraction/excuse/redirect.

As if I'm really going to trust an announcement from the state that we can't eavesdrop on communications from company X without thinking it through.

Especially when it's well known the Skype protocol has been broken and has back doors for a long time. Being able to intercept communications has been a requirement here in the US for awhile. It sounds like they just want everyone to start using it. Or it's an excuse to do a run around current German privacy laws.

And, don't forget to add that we've not been in contact with the company. Ya, that adds up. Here's how I read it. "Hey everybody! We can easily eavesdrop on skype calls and decrypt on the fly, please start using it. Or, everybody thinks we can't tap these calls, we'll use that as an excuse to get even more eavesdropping capabilities.

Either way I don't buy it.

Re:There's something very wrong with this article

[PerlDudeXL]

He is the current director of the "Bundeskriminalamt" (Federal Criminal Police Office):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Criminal_Police_Office_(Germany)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rg_Ziercke

Can ISS's Proventia G100 desypher Skype chat?

[methamorph]

Is it true that ISS's Proventia G100 can decypher Skype chat conversations?

Hanlon's Razor

[Moraelin]

While normally I would encourage a moderate dose of paranoia, I'd also recommend it to be balanced by Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

This being Germany, for a start you have to realize that the police doesn't seem to be particularly incline toward conspiracies, nor any good at it. They're also (still) more monitored than what, judging by the news coming from the USA, seems to be the case with the FBI and CIA. These guys will tell you up front that they want stuff like the "federal trojan". Then it gets struck down as unconstitutional, lather, rinse, repeat.

At any rate, they're not the kind who'll do a backroom deal with some ISP to do it in stealth and secrecy. They're very open in requesting to be allowed to do all sorts of stupid stuff. Which I guess is the whole idea in a democracy and rule of the law.

Also, well, I don't know which particular group tried to crack skype, but the general stereotype about German public servants is... not very flattering. Not that they're evil or insidious, mind you. They tend to actually be nice people. More like just thoroughly lazy, incompetent, underworked, underachieving... you get the idea. Some more extremely than others. There's a whole category of jokes about them.

So, well, going by the stereotype, I'd really go by Hanlon's Razor there. There's a possibility that they genuinely don't have anyone who can crack anything above ROT13.

Re:Hanlon's Razor

[paulhar]

I suggest if you haven't seen the film Das Leben der Anderen (Lives of Others) then it's well worth doing so. It's a work of fiction but afaik has basis in fact.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

They are not done yet...

[sipatha]

Ziercke said there was a vital need for German law enforcement agencies to have the ability to conduct on-line searches of computer hard drives of suspected terrorists using "Trojan horse" spyware. These searches are especially important in cases where the suspects are aware that their Internet traffic and phone calls may be monitored and choose to store sensitive information directly on their hard drives without emailing it. Spyware computer searches are illegal in Germany, where people are sensitive about police surveillance due to the history of the Nazis' Gestapo secret police and the former East German Stasi. Ziercke said worries were overblown and that on-line searches would need to be conducted only on rare occasions.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/security_internet_germany_dc;_ylt=AlwLgE9jmUw9utW8iIdk5rQDW7oF

Re:Idiots, Skype decrypts calls for all authoritie

[link-error]

    Or perhaps, they want to be able to listen without a court order?

Tongue in Cheek

[Kozz]

Tongue in cheek...

...and continue to develop the trojan...

Yeah, but does it run on Linux? If they manage that, I'd be impressed.

Colossus

[LordPenguin]

Perhaps the German police need to borrow Colossus :-)

I hope this gets people to distrust closed-source

[KWTm]

We cannot break Skype encryption, and we have publicly announced that, so it's perfectly safe for you to keep on using it! Really!

This is exactly what I would proclaim if I was able to decrypt the traffic and want users to think that I couldn't. Maybe not all whatever terrorists would fall for this but some would.

But then again, maybe they're smarter than this. Maybe they really can't break it. But they want you to think they can break it, so they tell you they can't, because they know terrorists (and slashdotters) always expect the government to try and mislead them.

Well, I hope this brings more public awareness of the pitfalls of closed-source software, and its open-source alternatives such as OpenWengo. Even law-abiding users who don't mind using a proprietary solution like Skype should be aware of open alternatives, just as Slashdot geeks will often use unencrypted email but know how to use OpenPGP when the situation calls for it.

Re:Idiots, Skype decrypts calls for all authoritie

[E 99]

Or do you thing that USA would just allow osama bin laden to host conference calls with wannabe terrorists using Skype. In fact Skype clearly admits that they decrypt the calls for all requesting authorities.

Kurt Sauer, Skype's chief security officer, said there are no "back doors" that could let a government bypass the encryption on a call. At the same time, he said Skype "cooperates fully with all lawful requests from relevant authorities." He would not give particulars on the type of support provided.

The quote seems to undermine your claim. Skype uses end-to-end public-key encryption, meaning that the company would not have the ability to decrypt phone calls or messages for authorities, any more than your ISP could decrypt an SSL session with your bank for authorities.

Tap the source voice and lose the voice to text.

[whardier]

I'd love to say "Terrorists, you should do this instead..." but I don't want feds knocking on my door. I don't support terrorism, however I do support raising public awareness of digital security and mentioning whats working for us is also fighting against us.

Through P2P VPN networks, TOR networks, anonymous relays and botnets you can become mostly untraceable. The layered encryption of TOR would make decoding any digital string a nightmare - including getting a FOIA request out to every ISP that could have possibly routed traffic between TOR peers. Hosting your own TOR network is pretty dang easy as well. It's also not likely somebody will connect to a privately hosted TOR network, or even know where to look.

I personally host my own TOR network and channel IRC and IM sessions from my workplace through my home connection. You can do a heck of a lot more than that including host your own personal underground Internet. The same goes with Hamachi, however you are not nearly as anonymous.

Anybody that wants to stay hidden can easily hop on existing TOR networks and advertise their IRC server to any number of recipients. It's my impression that if you are computer smart enough to use Skype, you are smart enough to use IRC sessions under TOR, or even talk through SSH sessions on *nix machines. The possibilities to protect your transmissions are endless. The verification methods between yourself and others can be quite secure if you understand how it works.

By the way, you can tunnel just about anything through anything else.. most people disagree since there is no QOS and it's highly latent and inefficient. Remind yourself not to disagree or ignore silly methods of doing things just because you wouldn't want to do things that way. Its very likely that any terrorist/criminal activity over the Internet that uses encryption doesn't care about their voice quality as much as they care about getting information securely transited between them.

To the PD, source tapping is necessary if you want to prove you are doing all you can. I feel as though it is a highly futile effort. Technology doesn't need to change in order to evade source tapping, only the method of communication. Increase undercover efforts since that seems the best source tap in your arsenal, one it easily adjusts with the criminal activity.

Two points

[Sloppy]

First, it should be unbreakable. If the government can crack it, then so can anyone else. There are so many bogeymen on the 'net, that it would be ridiculously irresponsible to deploy an easy-to-break VoIP system.

Second, Skype is very breakable. There's no secure key exchange: Skype is a totally trusted introducer. Government, if you want to break Skype, just ask them to help with your MitM attack.

But that vulnerability should be Skype-only, and a "serious" VoIP system should be quite resistant. IMHO, phone apps should be built on OpenPGP, except also include some kind of OTP support since most people talk to people they regularly meet in real life. (Actually, I sort of think we need OpenPGP to be expanded to include a standardized OTP.)

Re:Idiots, Skype decrypts calls for all authoritie

[maxwell demon]

Unless they have the private key, of course. It should be trivial for Skype to get the private keys: After all, both the software and the protocol are proprietary; it would be trivial for them to include sending the private key to Skype's servers.

Depends who's listening, doesn't it?

[Fantastic Lad]

Aside from the fact that this is most likely not a real problem for the police, (as has been pointed out by several other posters), if operatives working in departments other than the police, (military, secret services), want to know everything about you, then technological barriers basically don't exist.

As was pointed out to me once by somebody who worked in the field, a simple light bulb can be used as a two-way monitoring device if you have equipment sensitive enough to read the signal. It's all just energy, and you have no secrets. The cops don't know this, though, but they're not exactly in the loop.

Of course, I'm probably just be talking through my head, right? The best way to keep secrets is to make the truth seem like a fantasy.

-FL

Re:Idiots, Skype decrypts calls for all authoritie

[E 99]

Yes, they could conceivably program their software to send the private keys to the server, but that would of course completely undermine the point of using Public Key Encryption, and also undermine their claim to providing "end-to-end" encryption, which I would think would make them liable for charges of false advertising or other things. There's no compelling reason for them to risk alienating their customers and possibly exposing themselves to legal liability, so I would tend to take them at their word. Of course, I might feel differently if I were considering using it to organize the overthrow of the government.

Closing report ticket as "by design".

[Arancaytar]

Duh. That's what encryption is supposed to do.

Screw those nosy spooks. I'd like go to this demonstration tomorrow if I had the time.

Last Year 'German Officials' pwned Skype?

[vic-traill]

So last year we heard that mysterious 'German Officials' were

claiming they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls from no less of a source than the New York Times (via Skype forums): http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=54163

So, who pwns who?

Skype couldn't help

[eean]

Skype can't break its own encryption. Thats the whole point of encryption. /Maybe/ the NSA (or the German's equivalent if they have one) can break the encryption, but probably not.

I think they're missing the point

[hacker]

Someone should re-educate the German government (and other governments who try this), that encryption is meant for a purpose... to prevent unauthorized individuals from intercepting the communications protected by the encryption. Let me re-state that in a simpler way:

If the German government is not the sender, or the intended recipient, they do not have any right to see, hear or intercept the information. Period.

If they can't decrypt the encrypted data stream, then the encryption is doing its job. That's the point.

If the encryption can be decrypted, then it is no longer encryption, and should be rewritten to properly secure the information again, locking out unauthorized access.

Not unbreakable, just very tough

[Leemeng]

Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux debugged the Skype executable and protocol for Black Hat Europe 2006.

http://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-media-archives/bh-archives-2006.html#eu-06

Skype has a slew of protections including code integrity checks, anti-debugging techniques, code obfuscation, and Skype network obfuscation.

Incidentally, Desclaux is the author of the Rasta Ring 0 Debugger [RR0D] which is not detected by Skype.

Rather technical issues by (good) design

[MetroCross]

From what I understand about Skype in general is that while the contact information (i.e. your Skype contacts) is centralized, calls and chats are done peer-to-peer without necessarily connecting to a central server. Therefore at least the chats which are always encrypted by default should be pretty secure because it a least seems very improbable (and impractical, too) for your Skype client to open a second connection to a central server for the means of logging all that stuff. For calls I'd assume it's the same.

So yes, while technically this is still doable, it's highly impractical and I guess that is the problem authorities are whining about. Even if they ask the central in Luxembourg to log all staff and hand it over, they just don't have the means to get it there.

Re:Tap the source voice and lose the voice to text

[duffbeer703]

It's widely acknowledged that Tor can easily be undermined by establishing compromised nodes on the network. Since Tor was originally a US Navy project and is well known, I think it's safe to assume that the network is at least partially compromised.

I think that if you're up to something that attracting the attention of the intelligence agencies, your communications will be compromised if you're using a global network. VPNs and encryption like SSH are dependent on the strength of your keys and passphrases. Systems like Tor depend on trusted nodes. Phones can be tapped. Cars with OnStar can eavesdrop on your conversations with a court order. All you need to do is mess up once.