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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.
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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.
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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"
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This has changed some time ago.
Personal usage of crypo is currently apparently free for keys of any size. However export may be subject to declaration or possibly in some cases prior authorisation. GPG and PGP may be used freely.
See http://www.ssi.gouv.fr/archive/fr/reglementation/regl_crypto.html for a summary (in French, also requires poking at a few other files to make sense of it, typical government site...).
I don't know what the stance is on key disclosure vis à vis the authorities.
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