Microsoft May Add Eavesdropping To Skype

An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes 'recording agents' to legally intercept VoIP phone calls. The 'Legal Intercept' patent application is one of Microsoft's more elaborate and detailed patent papers, which is comprehensive enough to make you think twice about the use of VoIP audio and video communications. The document provides Microsoft's idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties."

Comments

Re:Sure, but how will Microsoft abuse it?

[lostmongoose]

Uhh... try the law? Microsoft may have the technical ability to intercept private conversations, but it doesn't have the legal authority. This should be no more worrisome than your telephone companies building in tapping capabilities, in order to comply with the federal CALEA law. And I'm writing this even though I think the CALEA law itself is a bad idea... What it boils down to, is that it would almost certainly take law enforcement intervention in order to do a legal interception of a conversation. The fact that it is happening over the internet doesn't change any of the basic legal principles involved.

Because the Law was ever a deterrent to MS before. Good luck with that.