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."
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:5, Interesting)
The European governments who want to eavesdrop on suspected criminals after obtaining a court order, or the US and UK governments who are presently listening to everybody in Europe, and have been for quite some time, through ECHELON?
Re:Too many loopholes (Score:5, Interesting)
Precisely. Intercepting communications is pointless if the target has reason to suspect they are being watched. That's why the US and Britain went to great efforts to disguise the fact that they had broken the German and Japanese encryption systems during WWII.
For instance, when American fighters shot down admiral Yamamoto's plane the US didn't report the fact. They wanted the Japanese to believe that was just a chance encounter, not an action planned from a flight schedule they had known from decrypted Japanese communications.
Honeypot, baitcar or try zphone (Score:3, Interesting)
Via hardware or software a gov can intercept with your calls.
Any info seems more about extending national or wider legal powers.
ie. Skype has been open to law enforcement, they just want to use it in court.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Skype_and_the_Bavarian_trojan_in_the_middle [wikileaks.org]
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:5, Interesting)
If criminals knew that much about IT, they would have an IT career, not a criminal one.
Most criminals are at best casual users of computers. While they might hire a whiz kid to encrypt their calls, that is quite rare: hiring someone from outside the criminal environment to encrypt communications opens a much larger security hole than Skype ever could.
You are assuming that the knowledge level common here on Slashdot is common in the real world. It isn't. I remember that Bernardo Provenzano, head of the Sicilian Mafia, used a Caesar cipher using a bible as key to send its orders around, and someone here on Slashdot commenting "what, he does not know of PGP?!?".
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:2, Interesting)
Not to mention that just about anything can be tunneled through SSH. And exactly what exists to stop terrorists or other criminals from simply creating their own protocols? Do they think that law-abiding citizens have some sort of monopoly on computer geeks? I think almost any decent network programmer with some sort of communications security background should be able to come up with an entirely new, secure protocol from scratch.
Probably they should just outlaw the whole Internet and all forms of encryption if their goal is to prevent criminals and terrorists from communicating in ways that can't be monitored.
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:3, Interesting)
If criminals knew that much about IT, they would have an IT career, not a criminal one.
Unlikely - that argument might work for petty thieves, but not major criminals, especially terrorists whose motivation is often not money in the first place.
Re:If governments are bad ..... (Score:5, Interesting)
my alternative is a complete ban on ALL wire-tapping.
making all electronic communication the equivalent of whispering in a person's ear.
why would one be considered a fundamental human right and yet the other be so easily discarded?
criminals have the right to air, water, food, shelter, clothing. I'd also add 'right to communicate freely' in that list.
once we start whittling down what rights 'certain' people have, you are on the road to societal doom.
I don't believe 'the end justifies the means' and that's ENTIRELY what this wiretapping is all about. we'll VIOLATE your right to communicate in privacy - because there's some 'bad guy in a turban' that we want to stop.
this is insane! the founding fathers would not have given up our freedom to 'ensure' temporary safety and we shouldn't sell our freedoms out, either!
no, I don't agree that police and the gov have any INHERENT right to tap our comms. nothing at all gives them THAT kind of right-stomping ability, no matter WHAT the cause is.
in all situations, humans should have the DIGNITY to communicate and not have to worry about how is stealing their thoughts, ideas or even worse - who is going to MIS-INTERPRET your writings or speech. I'm waiting for the case where someone's fictional writing is intercepted and someone gets into 'big trouble' when the wiretappers refuse to believe that a person's private writing is just that - private. same with phone, net and anything else including email.
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:1, Interesting)
All governments work in self interest. Therefore no government can be trusted. Spying on innocents accomplishes several things: (1) revenue, (2) control, (3) precedent for the next expansion of power and revenue. For the people at the top of the power pyramid, this is simply good business. For the rest of us, it's called oppression (let's not beat around the bush by calling it "big brother").
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:3, Interesting)
He used a Caesar cipher and bible quotations. [google.co.uk]
Great Satan (Score:1, Interesting)
It's worse than that, they're hostile countries looking to harm our children
Well, they are. When the head of Iran says that he's going to get the bomb and the USA is as the Great Satan, do you suppose he's just joking around?
Satan tends to have different meanings in different cultures.
AFAIK, Satan is viewed as more as a Temptor in Islamic culture, versus the Evil One in Christian / Western culture.
So when the Iranians say that the USA is Satan, they mean it to be that the values and actions of the country will lead people astray from the proper and righteous (another misunderstood word) path.
(Please correct me if this interpretation is incorrect in any way.)
It should also be noted that Iraq did not have the bomb and was invaded, while North Korea does and they were not. Having The Bomb is good way to ensure your sovereignty.
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:3, Interesting)
Mafia is organized crime. The whole point of organization is division of labour. The very fact that you distinguish between the Mafia soldier and Mafia boss is evidence enough of that. Consequently, it doesn't matter whether Don Stoneage knows a computer or not, since he has IT staff to do it for him; and if he doesn't have them yet, he'll certainly hire some after Don Dinosaur gets busted and the media helpfully discusses the poor state of his computer security and how it contributed to his arrest over and over again.
Natural selection favours Mafia bosses who are capable of learning from other people's mistakes.
Re:Too many loopholes (Score:1, Interesting)
The Skype protocol/encryption are only well known to the secret services. To us mere mortals, they're closed. People like Biondi/Descaux [blackhat.com] have gained some insight but by no means reverse-engineered the protocol.
I don't believe for a second they're only now starting to listen in on Skype calls. There's too much evidence that Skype already has a backdoor [itwire.com].
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as a pilot, I have to say it's landing that's more difficult. There are autopilot systems that can take off, fly, and land, but landing's the challenging one.
But in any case, the reason you have a pilot is for when things go wrong. When things are going right, a monkey could take off, fly, and land a plane. When things go wrong, it takes knowledge to know what has gone wrong, and how to survive it. That's where the difficulty comes in.
I can't find the graph online but there's a neat graph that's included in any primary instruction manual, showing workload vs. fatigue for a typical flight. The highest peak on the workload graph is just before and during landing, which is also the lowest point on the fatigue curve, hence much of the reason that landings are stressful.
Now, disasters during takeoff are much more dangerous. They happen fast and you have lots of fuel and weight. But they're also much more rare, thankfully.
Re:"Allowing Criminals" (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I think some really new planes have autoland. And autopilot is pretty simple in many planes. It just keeps altitude and heading from drifting. Many of the big jets do have real auto-nav, but from what I remember reading, it's not as simple to set up as telling your GPS where to go.
Of course, if all you need is city level accuracy, a handheld GPS unit in the cockpit is more than enough. Hell, the GPS in my phone would work.
Flying isn't all that hard, particularly if the trained pilot already got the jet off the ground. The big multi-engine jets are complex, but once you're in flight, you don't really need to know that much about them to crash them into a building.
If they wanted to get really fancy with the jets, they could set up a key sequence to transfer control to a remote system via satellite. That would really screw with the ter-ists. :) Auto-crash-into-the-ocean mode would be interesting as well, though less friendly to the passengers. :)
How would NSA react if they broke skype? (Score:2, Interesting)
So, we can assume, that if any intelligence organization today breaks eg. skype encryption, they might go to great lengths in publicizing the service as secure ?
Say, by making it appear that national and international police is unable to tap it efficiently, and starting a long-winded bureaucratic process "allowing" police access ?