European Crackdown On Skype "Loophole" 230
angry tapir writes "Suspicious phone conversations on Skype could be targeted for tapping as part of a pan-European crackdown on what law authorities believe is a massive technical loophole in current wiretapping laws, allowing criminals to communicate without fear of being overheard by the police. Eurojust, a European Union agency responsible for coordinating judicial investigations across different jurisdictions, has announced the opening of an investigation involving all 27 countries of the European Union."
Communication privacy in freedom (Score:4, Informative)
One does not need to rely on proprietary or otherwise closed source solutions and protocols which may have or can in the future carry backdoors to achieve communication privacy. For the past three years, one could simply apt-get install twinkle with ZRTP support from any Debian repository, which has an open and proven model for peer-to-peer media security and a reference implementation of the ZRTP stack that is part of the GNU Project. More recently, there is SIP Communicator, purely Java based and truly multi-platform, which uses the newer ZRTP4J stack. Existing non-B2BUA based SIP servers like opensips or GNU sipwitch can be used to organize and coordinate scalable secure calling networks. All the tools are there to do verifiable communication privacy in freedom today.
Re:Ah Europeans (Score:3, Informative)
The EU wants the existing wiretap legislation, the one that requires showing cause in court and getting a warrant, to be expanded to also include forms of IP-telephony. The Bush administration wiretapped everyone they felt like, without even bothering to show any cause or get a warrant from that rubber-stamp of a court that is FISA.
Seems pretty obvious that you'd think the criticism of Bush is 'crap' then, since you obviously don't understand the important distinction here. And yes, it's a pretty damn important distinction. Important enough to have been codified into the US Constitution as the Fourth Amendment. [wikipedia.org]
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:2, Informative)
I think you're overestimating the terrorists. At least in the UK they try to make explosives and mess it up [wikipedia.org], try to ram a building with a car without checking the bollard spacing [wikipedia.org], and so on.
I read that in Operation Crevice they thought that web based emails could not be intercepted if they were saved in Drafts rather than sent. Needless to say this isn't the case.
Actually I sort of wonder about jihaadi websites recruiting people to fight in Iraq/Afghanistan too. Soon after 9/11 a lot of websites were shutdown. It's not impossible that all the ones left are either working for the intelligence services or bugged by them. Certainly lots of people going to fight abroad seem to get picked up by allied intelligence services.
In an odd sort of way, being able to intercept people who actually want to use force against the liberal system allows you to let them keep walking around. It's a bit like virtualisation - if you know you can catch all the attempts to bring down the system, you can leave people free to everyone try, which is sort of the point of a free society. And it's not like there aren't checks and balances - Parliament has to approve the laws and juries have to approve the convictions. And the media is free to point out if the convictions are unjust.
Of course, having non virtualisable things like Skype messes this scheme up. But look at the big picture here - historically free societies that don't protect themselves against their internal enemies got replaced with much less liberal societies. It seems like you have a choice between stable tyranny, and or a democracy that protects itself. Anarchy is just a gateway state to tyranny, it is not a model for a stable society.
Alternatives to Skype (Score:2, Informative)
icmp chat ( http://www.codito.de/ [codito.de] , http://www.codito.de/prog/icmpchat-0.7.tar.gz [codito.de] ) support encryption and pads data to appear like completely normal ICMP traffic. It also supports all ICMP types, not just echo request/reply, so getting creative is trivial.
Of course, port forwarding/proxy'ing anything/everything through ssh or openvpn is also trivial. Good luck eavesdropping on that.
If anyone is caught doing anything "bad" with Skype, they're just ignorant, lazy, or both.