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Skype Apparently Threatens Russian National Security
Mr.Bananas writes "Reuters reports that 'Russia's most powerful business lobby moved to clamp down on Skype and its peers this week, telling lawmakers that the Internet phone services are a threat to Russian businesses and to national security.' The lobby, closely associated with Putin's political party, cites concerns of 'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators,' as well as a fear that law enforcement agencies have thus far been unable to listen in on Skype conversations due to its 256-bit encryption."
Will there be any double standards? Will the US politicians start citing all sorts of things about human rights violations and the like while still supporting warrantless wiretapping and other illegal surveillance on citizens and legal residents? The U.S. stopped wearing the white hat long ago... sad.
This is the new incarnation of formulaic news.
SURPRISE, yet another national govenrment considers unhindered, truly private free speech to be a national security risk, from france to the good-ol' US of A every government is probing their constitutions and public opinion with microscopic probes looking for the loopholes and excuses which will make their abolition appear justified.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
So, security is threatened because people can more easily communicate securely? But before VOIP, when more people used insecure phone channels, security was better? The solution to these security problems is to prevent encryption so that anybody with the right tools and knowledge can listen to any conversation?
'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators,'
Yeah, I bet the horse shoe manufacturers lobbied hard against the introduction of the self-propelled carriage too.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Would that be the Russian Business Network?
German police let that one slip, so did a few other arrests. :)
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Skype_and_SSL_Interception_letters_-_Bavaria_-_Digitask
http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/01/bavarian-government-caught-looking-for-skype-backdoor.ars
The rest of Russia's problem is what? A revenue drop from its diaspora?
But they do have a point, the way the "Skype" codec is moving into many free and closed applications.
The Russians miss the good old days when they could track a sat phone and send a guided bomb down (Dzokhar Dudayev)?
But then the NSA did help with that one
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Yup, we can't listen in at all, especially to you confounded anti-Putin dissidents! You can go ahead and discuss anything you want over Skype, and there's no way we'll target you, intercept your call, use it to find some obscure law you've broken, rustle up some evidence, and send you on a whirlwind tour of the Russian justice system!
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Are we sure Russia is no longer communist?
rubbish ebay lets governments-in on key-sniffing... i think this is a way to get some people by using their own stupidity of false security. Skype if you want to be secure isn't secure not as long as it's run by a company as Ebay, and isn't transparent about it's sourcecode... anyone thinking skype is a shield against governments "police" is an idiot...
Some blathering about security is to be expected, but it's interesting that, unlike when this sort of stuff happens in the US or Europe, they actually came out and said the real reason: "concerns of 'a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators' ". I.e., ban it because it would hurt our profits.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Why are we spreading this FUD??? Big bad Russia trying to exterminate Skype. If you actually read about what they are talking it's nothing special. They talk about VOIP services in general and they talk about Skype because it's the biggest VOIP provider. They do mention ICQ too... You can make VOIP calls with ICQ too. ICQ isn't really popular here, but in Europe the defacto chat client that also has voice calls. The bottom line... no phone or cable company anywhere in the world likes Skype because they loose money. Why make this a political issue? As for not being able to tap Skype calls... again, it's a concern for all governments... including the US.
fear that law enforcement agencies have thus far been unable to listen in on Skype conversations due to its 256-bit encryption.
Don't they mean 119-bit encryption? :-)
I have to wonder, what do the governments think they have to accomplish by removing free speech? Do they really think that it will let them hold on to more power? I mean, with increasing freedom of religion you see an increase of lack of religion (atheism, agnosticism, etc). Give enough people unrestricted freedoms and they will tend not to use it, tighten down those freedoms and you have a large amount of people wanting to test every limit of it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
definately they do different than in america, where Windows should be seen as threatening national security (think in a digital pearl harbour, where the defenses have a big sign over saying "Come and attack here"). Anyway, calling something threat to security because protects citizen privacy is not very nice, if something have to motivate citizens to use even more secure communication protocols is hearing government complaining about how hard is to spy on them.
According to a shocking report just published by "The Economist", "it was the kind of scene she had described many times. On July 15th at 8.30am, as she left her flat in Grozny, Natalia Estemirova was forced into a white Lada. She shouted that she was being kidnapped, but those who heard were too scared to report it. By the time her colleagues had found out, she was dead, murdered by three bullets in her chest and a control shot in the head.
There was a mark from a man's hand on her shoulder, where she was grabbed, and a bruise on her face, where she had been hit. Her wrists bore the marks of bindings. Ramzan Kadyrov, the authoritarian Chechen president, considered her an enemy. And she died as one. She documented hundreds of similar cases in Chechnya, supplying witness statements and photographs, forcing prosecutors to investigate and the media to write about kidnappings, torture and killings, often conducted by people in official uniforms. Much of what the world knew about Chechnya came from her and her colleagues at Memorial, a heroic group which started by documenting Stalinist crimes but continued to trace their modern-day consequences, especially in the Caucasus."
Natalia Estemirova was born to a Chechen father and a Russian mother. She was a history teacher. One day, upon seeing the dying bodies of Chechen victims killed by Kremlin-backed militia, she swore to help the victims of gross human-rights violations in Chechnya.
She did indeed help the victims by documenting their tragic lives and condemning the Kremlin and the Kremlin-backed government in Chechnya. Allied with Anna Politkovskaya, Estemirova obtained the only conviction of a Russian thug for brutalizing and killing a Chechen.
When the Kremlin-backed government of Chechnya killed Estmirova, it killed the soul of Russia. The evil in the Kremlin rivals the worst evils of Chinese society.
Buddha may forgive Vladimir Putin, but I cannot. God damn him.
After all, in soviet russia, national security threatens you.
National Security threatens Skype
You NO mess with mother Russia
My dear friends, let us not forget...Skype is a telephone nobody understands.
It is reasonable for Russia to be worried about security since with Skype they can't track it properly.
But to stop letting people use Skype or totally disable it because of profits to phone companies is just plain stupid.
Skype is wonderful for people who can't afford the prices of phones and international/national fees. I don't pay for a single phone bill, my parents put Skype on their computers and same with my friends/siblings. When we want to call, we just log onto our laptop/desktop, press Call and viola. It's a wonderful piece of technology, really is.
I see their problem with security. Terrorists could use this on laptops and really not be tracked. Except you need Internet and with Internet you can be tracked. :)
Russia, just track laptops. I'm sure you can do it.
Someone needs to explain to Democracies* the world over that National Security != The Incumbents ability to get re-elected.
* even Zimbabwe is a Democracy these days.
OK and Skype is carried over what, and owned by whom in Russia? Unless the answer is magic pixie dust, I don't think the Russians have too much to worry about.
It's not a threat to us as we can listen in on our citizens... Take that commies!
I work at a place where a lot of people call in on their skype lines and I fucking hate the sound quality. It's like i'm talking to someone at the end of a god damn tunnel. You can keep it.
In American you use skype to call, In Soviet Russia skype gets called!
There maybe be a political angle to this also. Skype is originally written in Estonia. Diplomatic relationship between Russia and Estonia is not exactly warm at the moment. I guess that makes "the threat to Russian businesses" particularly "threatening".
Since when relying on a third party, closed, encrypted platform owned by an American company for communications is free speech?
As Skype etc. are common "household" names on the internet, we forget the security implications of using such solutions for business. As long as Skype is a closed, proprietary platform, I can agree with any governments (including USA) concerns about Skype.
Of course, if they claim a problem, they should provide a solution. For example, a trust of SIP providers, sponsoring open source SIP solutions, help open source applications to have Russian support. When they sound like "lets go back to copper", the entire point is gone.
Don't forget the telecom industry since the beginning is documented, open, standards based. For example, even in the cold war, Russian telecoms used SSN-7 standards documented by AT&T etc.
You are thinking of security in terms of "security of the data," they are thinking in terms of "security of the state." If you read up on the history of the USSR, you find that they were positively PARANOID about any sort of subversive or revolutionary activity. The state had to be protected at all costs. Part of that was monitoring everyone to the maximum extent possible. Read up on Iron Felix, the Checka, the NKVD and the KGB. Scary shit.
Well, while the USSR is now officially gone, it isn't just as simple as saying "Ok we are free now." Russia still has many of the same people running it. The KGB may be gone in name, but all they really did was make some of the directorates different agencies. More or less the second, fifth and seventh chief directorates have been reborn as the FSB. Also note that Putin, who was prime minister and now president (they have both there) was a KGB agent.
Russia may be a little more open than the USSR was, but it isn't much and they are sliding back to the bad old days. A non-trivial amount (perhaps even most) of the people running the country seem to be of the mind set that control trumps all.
So, that's what they mean by security. They want to listen to any and everything citizens do to make sure none of them are plotting against the government. They care not a bit about the security of their citizens data.
When the Kremlin-backed government of Chechnya killed Estmirova, it killed the soul of Russia.
While the killing is tragic, I find that statement humorous.
The problem with Russia isn't just one man - whether it is Putin or his sock puppet president - being cruel. The whole administration, culture, etc. is deeply corrupt. I challenge anyone to drive across the country... No, half the country... Without being stopped by the "police" (militia) for no real reason and having to pay them directly some fine that they just came up with. And I'm not saying that "This will happen once". It will happen about a dozen times.
And the people there are fine with it or at least very used to it. Have learned to live with it. Over all politics - or lack of them - is not a light subject for discussion in Russia but if you do take it up there, you won't hear much heated arguments about how things will need to change.
I was once listening to an lecturer who talked about Russian mindset in Engecon (University of Engineering and Economics in St. Petersburg) and am very willing to agree with her that it well predates the communist era. Their whole history has been full of conquest and dictators. They have never even tried actual democracy and have learned to not really care all that much.
In fact, nationalism is extremely strong in Russia. I mean, they are willing to take the "We have a great country and must respect and support it and it's leaders, no matter what!" even further than people from USA...
So, it is entertaining to read "They killed the soul of Russia". Honestly, if majority of Russians cared about this, it would not have happened. While the Militia is pretty cruel, a few percent of people can never oppress everyone else if the majority really hates the situation enough. But they don't. It's not that they feared too much, it is that they care about completely different things.
I would almost accept that law enforcement needs a way to put taps on communications of organized crime syndicates to try and bring them down. But then I realized that without Skype they would just have to hire an IT guy to run an encrypted Asterisk server for their own personal use. Seems pretty trivial for even a small crime group to come up with a few hundred bucks a month to pay for secure communication when they are likely making tens or hundreds of thousands a month.
Obviously for the lobbyists it is just about money and power. That is the real issue here, not the safety of the community or security of the nation. Oh how very similar are the Russians and the Americans.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The deal is simple: mobile phone operators fear to lose their revenues and want to destroy the competition. That's their only motive. But they can't just go to the officials and say "we lose profits, ban skype" So they make up those ridiculous claims about "national security" and "uncontrolled communication channels" Anyway, "the strictness of Russian law is compensated by optional compliance", as the saying goes, so there.
the russians are motivated by loss of profits and loss of snooping ability
and you wish to frame this as an open source/ closed source argument
make believe that skype were 100% open sourced (in fact, there are such open source skype-like products out there). you honestly want to represent that the russian attitude would be any different towards open source software?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I read the article title and thought that they're concerned with this closed-source protocol with possible backdoors open to foreign agents..
Well.. D'oh.
Skype's core is made by estonians. Of course Russia feels threatened. ;-)
Is there a ban on encryption in France?
There is a ban on strong encryption. I think the limit of key is 40 bits. In case you want to use something stronger (Internet banking and the like) you can but the key must be given to a trusted third party and revealed to the government if they so ask. Linky.
They could always do what the Chinese gov did make them run tom-skype its logs everything and sends the logs to the chinese gov servers ... its BS that if you use skype your safe just about every Gov in the world has a key , there is a somewhat concerted effort to make you feel otherwise.......... Dont Trust The Bastards Skype is a trojan......
Russia slowly but constantly moves to the same destination as Germany where in 1933, believe me or not. It is obvious from Ukraine, where I'm living.
Really, Pravda? Yes, it means "Truth" in Russian, but if you are familiar with the paper, it's closer to being considered a rag than a reliable source of news information.
WWJD? (What Would Jonas Do? - Spinward Fringe by Ran
Agreed. No real surprise here. You can almost imagine the alarm if a substantial chunk of US VoIP traffic was being routed via Russian servers. The possible security risk makes it easy to lobby for a domestic solution.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Ethanol-fueled, wanna DIE?
Nothing new here: All brutal corrupt dictatorships hate Skype. Russia just happens to be the biggest and most technologically advanced brutal corrupt dictatorship in the world. Fascist dictatorships like Russia are designed to transfer the wealth of the society to a small group of very wealthy people.
What makes a fascist dictatorship different from a corporate state like the USA is that this small group of wealthy people actively try to prevent any wide introduction of new technology among the people that could reduce the amount of wealth that they get from the people.
Corporate states, on the other hand, actively encourage the people to develop and adopt new technologies in order the new wealth will be created. After new sources of wealth are created, the corporations move in to take them over and assume control over the new wealth source.
All brutal dictatorships, from a tiny Central African despot cannibal to the vast expanses of the Russian rodina hate new technology. They will always prohibit and delay its introduction until it can be shown without a shadow of a doubt that the new technology will bring in more wealth to the rulers than the old technology can. In any brutal dictatorship, any early-adopter of any new technology, regardless of how benign, is considered a political traitor.
It's just the way that the world works.
Sorry if this has already been pointed out, but they are just plain lying to get these laws passed.
"The RUIE commission took the decision to form a working group to prepare proposals for legislative control over IP activities in Russia. In that way Russia might follow the example of some countries, such as China, Canada and the United States which have banned or imposed severe restrictions on the use of VoIP."
I can use Skype without any restrictions whatsoever. If I really want to, I can use zFone an there is no way that the government can listen in to my voip calls at all.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
now that we "cannot listen skype conversations", you criminals can safely use this. hahaha
This is not an oxy-moron, because whenever you use the word "security," you have to ask, "Whose?" Your security is bad for their security, and vice-versa.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Sorry for the Anonymous reply, but for some odd
reason my login isn't working.
Frankly I don't believe this story from
the Russian government, for what ever that's
worth.
Hahahahaha. omg....skype saves our citizens money and offers privacy.....lets shut it down....