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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."
And what sensible criminal would use Skype anyway? If you care about potential eavesdroppers, you don't use proprietary encryption, and especially not proprietary encryption over a proprietary protocol that has been shown to be insecure (see the Black Hat paper).
If you want security, run SIP over SRTP, with clients that have undergone third-party security audits.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
All of them. If I have multiple older male siblings, I can address them all as "Big brother." The existence of one does not preclude the existence of others.
my alternative is a complete ban on ALL wire-tapping.
making all electronic communication the equivalent of whispering in a person's ear.
why would one be considered a fundamental human right and yet the other be so easily discarded?
criminals have the right to air, water, food, shelter, clothing. I'd also add 'right to communicate freely' in that list.
once we start whittling down what rights 'certain' people have, you are on the road to societal doom.
I don't believe 'the end justifies the means' and that's ENTIRELY what this wiretapping is all about. we'll VIOLATE your right to communicate in privacy - because there's some 'bad guy in a turban' that we want to stop.
this is insane! the founding fathers would not have given up our freedom to 'ensure' temporary safety and we shouldn't sell our freedoms out, either!
no, I don't agree that police and the gov have any INHERENT right to tap our comms. nothing at all gives them THAT kind of right-stomping ability, no matter WHAT the cause is.
in all situations, humans should have the DIGNITY to communicate and not have to worry about how is stealing their thoughts, ideas or even worse - who is going to MIS-INTERPRET your writings or speech. I'm waiting for the case where someone's fictional writing is intercepted and someone gets into 'big trouble' when the wiretappers refuse to believe that a person's private writing is just that - private. same with phone, net and anything else including email.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So suppose the police intercept the conversation example you used. What does it tell them? Well - first they are going to find out that neither of the people involved actually has an aunt emma, or indeed any aunt who owns cats. Alternatively they might be aware that the people involved don't exchange a lot of private information, hence are not close enough to care about the cat of some relative. So they know it's a code and from that they know that something is going to happen. The recipient is a suspected drug dealer, the sender a suspected supplier, so they guess that it's about a drug deal. Possible action: keep a close watch on the recipient of the message - he may receive the drugs soon, or he may establish contact with the persons receiving the drugs.
Even if they can't guess the first thing about the content of the message - intercepting it can still yield information. E.g. it could tell them that the recipient is online now - using the IP address they could identify his location - or they could obtain a voice sample which could be used for identification. They could use the time someone calls to identify their daily routine - if suddenly a call is made at an unusual time (e.g. 2 am for someone who usually sleeps early) then they can guess that something interesting is going on.
Taken to the extreme opposite - if intercepting communications between criminals would never yield results, then wire tapping in all forms would have to be stopped. We could determine whether that's the case by analyzing criminal cases - is wire tapping evidence never introduced, is wire-tapping information never used to guide investigations? If that's not the case, then we shouldn't expect a zero return for skype-interception either.