GOOD READ -- Speculation over back door in Skype

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Erich M. [me () quintessenz org]
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2008 9:17 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] Speculation over back door in Skype

David Farber wrote:
> ________________________________________
> From: geoffg () gmail com [geoffg () gmail com] On Behalf Of the terminal of geoff goodfellow [geoff () iconia com]
> Sent: Friday, July 25, 2008 4:33 PM
> To: David Farber
> Subject: Speculation over back door in Skype
>
> This is interesting:
> http://www.heise-online.co.uk/security/Speculation-over-back-door-in-Skype--/news/111170

Very funny, to get one's own news back via IP. The author of the
article, Daniel Sokolov, is a colleague and friend of mine.

Two weeks ago I did some "fly on the wall" reporting on the government
plans concerning internet surveillance" here in Vienna.

"Last week, Austrian broadcaster ORF, citing minutes from the meeting,"
well that was me. I was lucky enough not only to acquire the minutes of
the meeting but spoke to two of the participants as well.

The guys from the Austrian ministry of the Interior were not "high
ranking officials" but technicians speaking to telco and internet
provider technical staff.

That is why the cops talked in a very straight way and thus burnt more
than one populistic pseudo argument from their master, the minister of
the interior, Maria Fekter from the conservative party.

As the Austrian government collapsed 10 days ago elections are upcoming.
Conservatives face two right wing parties as competitors on the topic of
"law and order". So they started playing the surveillance card again, as
they had done before.

The gist of the ministry of interior: "We need internet surveillance to
fight organised crime".

The two ministry of interior technicians acknowledged at the meeting on
the other hand that their monitoring plans would not help fighting
organized crime  at all, only "non tech savvy single perpetrators" would
be caught.

The surveillance plan consists of network bridge/hub copying the traffic
on layer two to a machine owned by the ministry of the interior at the
providers' premises. Well, if you are tunnelling your traffic to any
server outside they intercept only encrypted traffic. Cop technicians
could not deny that fact.

They even said, they were having this informal meeting on a technical
level because there was no feasible way to promote those surveillance
plans on the political level: "there are currently no terror attacks
around."
Caused some havoc when I reported that. ;)

As to Skype. The cops said: "It is not trvial but we can intercerpt
skype meanwhile". This way they burnt another pseudo argument of their
superiors. Until he left office in May former minister of interior
Guenther Platter had whined over and over again publicly - that they
were not able to monitor skype.

For this reason he tried to introduce a law allowing the use of police
troyan horses to track down criminals on the net.

There must be a backdoor in skype, definitely. There had been the same
public complaints on "we cannot monitor skype" at the same ministerial
level in Germany. That complaining stopped around the beginning of 2008.
Two weeks ago the Austrian cops said they could do skype as well.

That follows the usual pattern in the realm of secret services
collaborating. The Germans getting something from the US and trading it
in to the Austrians thereafter. AFAIK the main worldwide skype gateway
to the circuit switched networks is in London. Just let Google do a bit
of work and look up when US and UK officials last complained about not
being able to monitor skype and when that stopped. From that time on
they were in.

For people reading German below are the original stories.

There is some fun in it when providers protested against being forced to
install government "tinker boxes" in their networks. ;)
Greetz from Vienna
Erich

http://futurezone.orf.at/it/stories/293368/

http://futurezone.orf.at/it/stories/293664/




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