Microsoft patent points to Skype snooping A new Microsoft patent points towards Skype becoming equipped for lawful interception, which could be important as the service grows up to challenge traditional telcos. The patent was filed back in 2009, but published* last week and picked up by Computerworld. Titled "Legal Intercept", it covers one way in which a VoIP-based …
"I predict this will not get in the way of the anti-microsoft bile we are about to witness."
Oh, that's right: Microsoft are "only following orders", so any justified criticism of their enthusiasm to do so is just "bile". Cast your mind back (if you can) to the Nokia Siemens Networks Iran surveillance scandal to see where corporate enthusiasm leads.
"If someone really wants to listen in on your conversatons they will MS or no MS."
Yay, the path to shiny isn't blocked after all! Sheesh!
Nobody is complaining, simply predicting. Can I predict the winning numbers for a lottery? I don't do lotteries so I have no interest in doing so.
They are many articles where it is not worth reading the comments because they are so predictable. Any article about Dixons/PC World will be full of self righteous know it alls with huge inferiority complexes. Articles about viruses will have the linux fan boiz tossing off while claiming only Windows machines fet infected and their OS is far superior. Articles about McKinnon will have US readers baying for him to be waterboarded in Guantanamo while UK readers will blame the US sys admins.
Why do you think there are such comments at the end of articles, requests from moderators not to be complete dick heads and from time to time pre-prepared standard comments to save the brain dead from having to think?
http://www.oreillynet.com/etel/blog/2007/04/skype_revenue_from_national_se_1.html
"Skype Revenue from National Security Agency?
- Skype can turn on a computer’s microphone on command
- data are routed to servers that use speech recognition to look for suspicious phrases
- algorithms can use the sound of keyclicks to guess [...] what is being typed.
Alain Brun (Head of Data Protection at the European Commission) refers to: an
agreement between Skype and Echelon to enable a 'spy' mode on all Skype products.
Financial analysts believe that a Skype-NSA could explain Skype’s business model.
Outside payments by government agencies would explain how Skype can hope to make
a profit. Otherwise the purchase of Skype by eBay still doesn’t make sense."
(Dr. Moshe Yudkowsky, O'Reilly Community, 2007)
I've seen it done ... initially the intercept is a little flaky but after a couple of dozen words it's very accurate. But it does require a real keyboard - at least the demo I saw did - so I doubt that it's going to work so well on a glass keyboard.
But there are other ways of attacking a glass keyboard.
Damn, so that is why the system is so slow. I mean, God forbid it do something logical like work out *your* IP address, and work out *their* IP address, and let data be piped directly between the two machines...
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"That won't wash in the real world, and neither will denying governments the right to listen in on their citizens."
I don't believe the capability to listen in on any of their citizens is (or should be) an automatic right for a government. It should be provided by public mandate, surely, and be removable in the same way? I was under the impression that a democratic government's powers are provided by the consent of the population. Where there is no consent, there is no power, and no right.
I do notice that people seem to have forgotten who works for whom, in the government -> population relationship :(
How about a democratically elected dictatorship who farm the population?
"Where there is no consent, there is no power, and no right.". Ideally so but I see a problem here.
Your rights as you perceive them are irrelevant, it's how those rights are interpreted by a legal system that is either sympathetic or hostile to your position.
"I was under the impression that a democratic government's powers are provided by the consent of the population"
Is it not more that by election are simply consenting to allow others to make decisions on your behalf, period?
The problem, with 'democracy' as the UK has evolved it, is that, having handed over consent, there is little accountability to ensure decisions are made as the electorate would like. An elected government (even one which the majority did not vote for) will still claim a mandate for whatever it is they decide to do.
We like to think that government is there to represent us, reflect our wishes and desires. Government thinks, because it's in power, whatever it does will. It's the disconnect between what we think we are handing over and what we actually do. We don't notice it when government does what we agree with but it's very noticeable when we do not agree.
…in the US, in the sense that the high-school textbooks indoctrinate subjects to believe since at least 1974, and you can make an excellent case for 23 December 1913.
Back when the world was a collection of agrarian/subsistence economies that were each effectively governed locally, people could do something about that.
But concentration of power and wealth scaled a LOT faster than accountability or education, and that was pretty much the end of such charmingly quaint notions as "democracy" or "rule of law".
software to scramble the signal before it gets to Skype?
Mic>Scrambler>Skype>Internet>Skype>Unscrambler>speaker
Or would that fuckup the compression algorithm?
Surely, these days, anyone who wants to communicate securely can anyway, so what difference would it make if Skype had a backdoor? Just as I'm sure the NSA, FBI, MI5/6, GlobalMegaCorp scramble their calls, I'm sure anyone else wanting to do the same could, no?
You're right, and wrong, if you want the security services to take an interest in your activities, using encrypted telephony is a good way, just as is repeating a number of key phrases too many time in a single open phone conversation. Government does us encrypted voice, but not as much as you might think, because it's expensive and inconvenient. To do it you need to have control of both end points, and share keys.
Encrypted streams shine out like anything on a network, and state, I'm hiding something, so al sorts of people will want to have a look, not just governments and their agencies. Talking in the clear is a much better bet, as the government is only likely to be listening in, if it has a warrant, and has cause that you are doing something wrong.
Ok, encrypting data streams is now a must for pretty much everybody, but voice no, and are you really saying you don't want governments to have the ability to listen in to the bad guys, just in case they might hear you discussing your acne problem with a chum.
It is impossible for the government to listen to everybody, it is just, way too expensive, and of no benefit. You'll only get listened too if give cause, and even then it has to be pretty major. Do you really think governments tap the phones of all the criminals in the UK, why do you think they would bother with you or me,
So, how do you tell the difference between a compressed and an encrypted datastream?
Next issue, how can you trust a snooping facility to only be used by law enforcement?
I won't bother asking about how far you might trust your government to do what's right.
If the government really wants to listen in on you, it will. This stuff like a skype backdoor is largely the state flexing its muscles to remind corporations who's in charge, or it is the echelon-style mass surveillance wet-dream back again. Neither will have an appreciable effect on anyone's safety, certainly not compared to police and intelligence agencies actually working for a living.
"as the government is only likely to be listening in, if it has a warrant, and has cause that you are doing something wrong".
Tell that to Jean Charles de Menezes, oh! you can't tell it to his family instead...
"It is impossible for the government to listen to everybody" "Do you really think governments tap the phones of all the criminals in the UK, why do you think they would bother with you or me"
However they do snoop. It is quite easy to snoop for key phrases on microwave links and packets routed across the interwebs.
If I remember correctly Duncan Campbell (journalist for New Statesman magazine) home, new statesman offices and the BBC were raided shortly before the BBC broadcast a program about the now cancelled British spy satellite zircon. I have a vague recollection of reading something at the time that they were referring to the satellite as 'zipper' in their communications and it was only after they started referring it to zircon that they came to the attention of the plods. I'm open to correction on that, but that's how I remember it.
A colleague of me told me of in incident where the telecoms company he was working for were told that a certain banks encrypted communications between offices in Switzerland and the UK were not to be routed through France as the French didn't allow encrypted traffic on their networks.
How did they know it was encrypted??????
To add insult to injury, I believe the line concerned was a leased dedicated private line as well.
>>" >>"as the government is only likely to be listening in, if it has a warrant, and has cause that you are doing something wrong".
>>"Tell that to Jean Charles de Menezes, oh! you can't tell it to his family instead..."
/Bit/ of a non sequitur there - they weren't listening in to him - the whole thing was nothing to do with Big Brother surveillance of innocent people, and everything to do with incompetent policing misidentifying someone leaving a building and also apparently not realising (despite presumably doing all kinds of training) that misidentification someone in a serious case (which has happened in the past, and will likely happen again in the future) could be pretty much to signing an innocent person's death warrant if that person was to do something as commonplace as get on public transport.
In any case, even if you were actually giving a relevant counterexample (possibly like the Zircon one), giving a counterexample isn't actually a great argument against someone saying '...only likely to be...', since that already suggests that there *will* be some counterexamples.
And in the Zircon example, it is kind-of related to national security, even if much motivation may be arse-covering for the defence industry. Even if entirely true as presented, it's not actually an argument against the suggestion that the government doesn't really have the ability to meaningfully snoop on /everybody's/ phone calls, since this obviously wasn't just some random citizen.
Doesn't make it right, but it's not evidence for a universal Big Brother either.
>>"encrypted communications between offices in Switzerland and the UK were not to be routed through France as the French didn't allow encrypted traffic on their networks."
>>"How did they know it was encrypted??????"
>>"To add insult to injury, I believe the line concerned was a leased dedicated private line as well."
Do you think a leased line between Switzerland and the UK involves a guy with a ladder walking across France putting up a special private piece of wire?
For whatever reason, if they decide to ban encrypted traffic on their network, that'll be likely to include *all* traffic.
Bad intelligence? Accusation from somebody that doesn't like you? Name "similar" to that of a wanted criminal/known terrorist?
Couple that with people who are employed to be as paranoid as hell, you might feel you don't have anything to hide or anything anybody would bother worrying about - but these could become large problems for somebody looking for some sense of wrongdoing on your part. It is our culture that it is easier to blame ("after all, you *must* be doing something wrong to have gotten this sort of attention in the first place") then to accept ("man, what a mess that is").
Face it - we *all* have secrets that could be taken badly by those looking to find fault. I have a disc of "Fight Ippatsu! Jūden-chan!!", shall I take it to the local church group and see how long it is before they explode...
"You're right, and wrong, if you want the security services to take an interest in your activities, using encrypted telephony is a good way, just as is repeating a number of key phrases too many time in a single open phone conversation. Government does us encrypted voice, but not as much as you might think, because it's expensive and inconvenient. To do it you need to have control of both end points, and share keys."
Which is why as many people should encrypt their streams (all varieties) as possible. Once the haystack gets big enough, they (pick your they) stop looking for needles.
I don't actually worry about my net traffic being listened in on, per se. I just don't think the government (or anyone else) should be doing so. It's the principle of the matter. I don't make exceptions for the police or the spooks, either. If it's that important, they can get a warrant, hunt me down the old fashioned way and stick a bug in my house. Of course, that means that so long as there are only a few like myself, I'm more than willing to send out streams of encrypted data for them to waste their time cracking open.
-d
" Of course, that means that so long as there are only a few like myself, I'm more than willing to send out streams of encrypted data for them to waste their time cracking open."
And every day I give thanks there are heroes like you patting yourselves on the back for sticking it to Da Man. Applause, applause, applause ...
The
> Mic>Scrambler>Skype>Internet>Skype>Unscrambler>speaker
process would require a fairly lossless transmission. Just look at how badly Skype handles touchtones to realise that the scrambler/de-scrambler would need to have a very intimate knowledge of the encoding used by Skype to ensure that the process would work OK.
Many of the posters are right. Resources are tight so do not waste them on a wild scatter gun method.
There are a huge number of ways to detect what you want, pattern recognition is one of the main ones.
Detecting none standard patterns is always an easy one, just stop and think. Digital streams are already computer readable the hard work is done just read the stream. Automatic scanning of huge data volumes is far better than manual observations which used to be the case in many countries, probably still is in all the people's republics. [They are where the people get to lick the boots of the thugs, the people do it hence the public and they all do the licking, explains their names.]
Yes France has a bit of downer on any method not using clear, encapsulated VPN type traffic can get them very excited. Do not try this at home, I suspect that' other jurisdictions can apply.'
Sadly profiling is against the various human wrongs acts. [Don't you just love the way the be-robed weird ones like to support their own by insisting that almost anyone gets to stay if they have offended the laws where they now live.]
Frankly retained thugs are a far greater risk to my freedom to live than any one listening to me having a fight with some cretin in a government office [where the call is recorded anyway] who has fouled up for the umpteenth time.
As for Skype turning on this that and the other, remove the microphone if you are so concerned, ditto for the webcam, or remove skype.
Really it is simple and nothing new.
Act like a prat, be caught as a prat - job done.
"Citizens aghast that their VoIP calls could be intercepted might be annoyed, but they'd be better off petitioning their governments, rather than raging against the companies trying to obey the law."
You need to petition both, but you have to go to the government to petition businesses (since you can't coordinate any form of petition against modern big business and they are perfectly fine doing business by bypassing the victim and dealing with the government or other businesses directly.) It's pretty difficult to know where the corruption starts, but you can't allow corporations to get away with something the government couldn't. Government should protect its citizens freedoms from all threats. When they let businesses get away with stuff it's that much easier to outsource things to the private sector where constitutional protections don't apply and there is no easy way to protest.
You really need to read the patent.. this goes far beyond just intercepting skype communications. FAIL.........
Read the patent yourself. This is 1984 in disguise giving the government easy access to spy on all packet based communication EG ALL INTERNET TRAFFIC not just skype. FAIL!!!!!
There is a certain degree of legitimacy in the government sponsored intercept. Part of the deal between public and government requires them to protect us. I agree with and expect this - with certain caveats, judicial oversight etc... OK there are some threats that could be argued to have been manufactured, Blair and Co. certainly kicked over a few hornets nests.
However, power corrupts, and the trawling of the entire Internet, VOIP included, is now fed to a number of gangster types, protecting corporate America.
Further details of commercial misuse of government data, and a clear description of what "Echelon" does, see: http://www.nsawatch.org/echelonfaq.html
MS buys hot chips, pisses in them!
Its the only thing MS have been good at for 20 years and now they don't even realise they've still got their dick in their pants.
They just paid $8 billion for something just to shit on it? I cant even mix my metaphors properly I'm laughing so hard!
I'm probably already on several of those lists thanks to my persistant anti-idiotarian atitude (which, naturally, gets misinterpreted as antiauthoritarian these days) and my outspoken belief that the government has a disturbing habit of ignoring the law whenever it wants.
Thankfully freedom of speech isn't one of the freedoms under attack here in the US, so I'm in no danger of being jailed. Yet.
and
"Resources are tight so do not waste them on a wild scatter gun method."
and maybe others too...
If that's what you really believe, perhaps you can explain why ACPO Ltd were recently exposed as having been running undercover police for several years infiltrating perfectly legitimate peaceful protest organisations. While "resources are tight".
That surely wouldn't have happened "without due cause" would it?
Well it did, and the copper in one particular case finally decided there wasn't due cause, and when he did so the show trial of a few dozen innocent people had to be abandoned before it started.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12382578 and many many others
I wonder whether Skype's move to a new SuperNode structure has anything to do with plans for "lawful" intercept. I would have thought that a widely distributed model would make it much more difficult. On the other hand there new architecture doesn't seem to be working half as well as their old one. I now frequently see inconsistencies in Skype's reporting of online/offline states.
The problem, as others have pointed out, with this type of digital interception is that anyone could then use it. With a conventional POTS system, the signal goes from your house to the phone exchange. Follows the phone companies links to the remote end and goes down the wire the calls recipients. The intercept has to take place somewhere in this route. Sure if a crim wants to tap they can go to the green box in the street and hook into your circuit. But they need to get off their arse and doing this.
With this new scheme, a crim anywhere in the world could potentially hit the buttons which would then turn on the interception of my packets.
Also if I'm in the UK, the POTS system the legal intercept to another user in the UK would require the active connivance of the either BT or the UK gov (both fairly untrustworthy, but there none the less). What safe guards could be put in place to prevent say the Chinese gov turning on the intercept of users in other parts of the world.
Skype representatives have been asked multiple times to confirm/deny that there is a backdoor in the algorithm. They haven't confirmed nor denied it and have always deflected the question. So I would think it is safe to say they can eavesdrop on you if they wanted to.
Now ask yourself if the CIA visited them and asked for BinLadens conversation would they (Skype) have facilitated it. My vote says they have. Probably on very rare occasions but I think they have already used the backdoor .
This is all speculation of course.
Microsoft bought Skype to create a P2P secure communications system based on Windows. This latest patent acquisition was done to retire the patent to keep it out of play. That way no-one else can do it either.
Also owning the patent allows Microsoft a leg up and developing security against it. And owning the patent for snooping means lawsuits against those who create other snooping software!
The point?
Blackberry is failing largely because foreign governments hate it for the same reason that Corporations love it. Secure communications.
This stems from pre-2008 Crash Day, when Mr. Christopher Story FRSA of worldreports.org was alive, well, and informing any and all who gave a shite re the Royal Scam, the Instruments Thereof, that telltale Giant Sucking Sound and that entire globalized 'n' criminally IT-driven Monetary+Financial operation's all-too-obvious+inevitable trickle-down+bubble-out+hoover-up Crashing Finale. This one did indeed pass the word in detail, necessarily uttering many oft-repeated unique keywords (such as "Bush", "Derivatives", "Merkel", "Banking Cartel", "Rothschild", "City of London", "The Crown" etc etc etc.) while so doing.
Odd indeed, how such a call would be reliably cut off (necessitating a dialback) once one started-in with these and similar on-topic utterances. Boringly predictable, really. Ninesey/'Levvensey Controlled Demolition+Mass Murder kerfluffle convos samesame: Different keywords, same cutoff... Nearly two years of this interference ensued - always via "Secure" Skype®.
I say no more re the Palestinian Situation in this context. (Surely, Gentle Reader, by now you get it.) FWIW: One savvy friend, in a casual face-to-face several months back, did mention Mossadim, Exactly Once. So Go Figger.
Net effect: After a few months of faithful verbal boil-um-down relay-reporting of the Latest Developments, the regular pattern of cutoffs actually served to convince a number of skeptical, basically receptive albeit deeply media-driven parties on the Other End that there really just might actually *be* something to the things being told them. (Hearts 'n' minds, hearts 'n' minds...)
For this one's part, frankly, I just plain Got Bloody Sassy. Started succinctly calling the Überschnoopenfuehrer Squad listeners-in out in spades, re their having so clearly sold-out their own humanity for the sake of Bloody Mammon - which, imvh&experienced_o, is in fact the case. (The Eight-Second Soundbyte can be a Devastating Thing when composed with care...)
Because inside jobs deserve exposure, is why. Because it was always all about the criminality and nothing to do with any politics (but for the Politics of Globalized Criminality), is why. Because it is better to accept a little insecurity in the course of ones' life than ever it was to abjectly surrender any part of ones' hard-won liberty, is why. Personal, national samesame imvh&experienced_o.
Because they have always hated our freedoms. Ergo Magna Carta, habeas corpus (R.I.P.), US Declaration of Independence etc etc etc. Consent of the Governed and all. (/Capice/, /paisan'/?)
Paris, because without Genuine Liberty and her handmaiden Actual Privacy all the Rest of Us are just soooo reliably 'n' predictably top-down hijack'd, raped 'n' skroo'd, is why.
Item: History may not in fact repeat itself - but it sure does rhyme. And that is all! 0{:-|o<
Interesting way to bugger up the competition - if governments demand "line-tapping" capabilities and you've got the patent on it, then you can deny competitors access. So, they're either barred from operating by the government (because they can't line tap) or break patent law...
The absurdity of software patent law is another argument entirely, of course...
>>"If that's what you really believe, perhaps you can explain why ACPO Ltd were recently exposed as having been running undercover police for several years infiltrating perfectly legitimate peaceful protest organisations. While "resources are tight".
>>That surely wouldn't have happened "without due cause" would it?
>>Well it did, and the copper in one particular case finally decided there wasn't due cause, and when he did so the show trial of a few dozen innocent people had to be abandoned before it started.
Surely the point there was that among the organisations he was getting information, there were members who did actually do things which were illegal, even if it seems that generally the worst was things like violent protests.
Clearly, there's a whole grey area about people acting as agents provocateurs, but it does seem like he was doing rather more in his years undercover than just hanging out with one group who occasionally protested outside power stations.
And on the practical side (again, leaving aside the 'Man Who Was Thursday' angle), if he and hence the state had feelers in all kinds of protest groups /but those groups carried on existing, and seemingly doing largely what they would have done anyway/, how crushing *was* the boot of Big Brother actually being?
Maybe the point of the infiltration was to try and make sure that there would be advance notice if things started getting a bit too heavy?
If there is the potential for one or other protest group to get a bit crazy, having some kind of idea what's going on isn't necessarily hideously oppressive.
At first glance, it looks like a huge amount of money to spend on undercover police, but just stopping and thinking about it, if they could give information about likely trouble at one or other demonstration that's more accurate than the police would have otherwise, there's at least the *potential* for getting police numbers right, and either saving money by not having too many, or preventing small disturbances escalating into a riot, so it might not be quite as daft/wasteful/oppressive as it would at first appear.
The tricky thing is in that kind of logic is knowing what would have happened with different police numbers at a given event.
If it seems that numbers were about right - fewer police and little trouble, or more police who manage to contain a decent amount of troublemaking, that could be seen as evidence in favour of undercover work.
If there's a report of likely trouble but then nothing happens when there are lots of police drafted in, it's easy to think that was disaster averted and people changing plans due to the police presence, rather than bum information, and see it as evidence in favour of undercover work.
Likewise, if there are reports suggesting little trouble but it does happen, that could be taken as evidence suggesting that /more/ undercover work is needed.
Once started, it's easy for someone convinced it's a good idea to see little reason to change their mind, whatever happens.
But ultimately, how far does my right to privacy go?
Does it seriously extend to cover all my activities, even those undertaken with large numbers of other people, and even when some of my actions or their actions may go beyond what's legal?
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