European Crackdown On Skype "Loophole"
angry tapir writes "Suspicious phone conversations on Skype could be targeted for tapping as part of a pan-European crackdown on what law authorities believe is a massive technical loophole in current wiretapping laws, allowing criminals to communicate without fear of being overheard by the police. Eurojust, a European Union agency responsible for coordinating judicial investigations across different jurisdictions, has announced the opening of an investigation involving all 27 countries of the European Union."
One does not need to rely on proprietary or otherwise closed source solutions and protocols which may have or can in the future carry backdoors to achieve communication privacy. For the past three years, one could simply apt-get install twinkle with ZRTP support from any Debian repository, which has an open and proven model for peer-to-peer media security and a reference implementation of the ZRTP stack that is part of the GNU Project. More recently, there is SIP Communicator, purely Java based and truly multi-platform, which uses the newer ZRTP4J stack. Existing non-B2BUA based SIP servers like opensips or GNU sipwitch can be used to organize and coordinate scalable secure calling networks. All the tools are there to do verifiable communication privacy in freedom today.