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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| EU to listen in on Skype calls |
| 2009-03-16 |
| NSA has identified Skype as the main communication tool used by terrorists. European prosecutors are eager to abolish the legal and technical hurdles to wiretapping Internet telephone calls to better fight organized crime. As early as next week, the European Union's judicial-cooperation agency Eurojust will receive an official request by Italian judicial authorities, who want to listen in on computer-to-computer phone calls between criminals who are increasingly turning to Voice over Internet Protocol programs such as Skype. "The possibility of intercepting Internet telephony will be an essential tool in the fight against international organized crime within Europe and beyond," Carmen Manfredda, an Italian Eurojust official, said in a statement. "Our aim is not to stop users from taking advantage of Internet telephony but to prevent criminals from using VoIP systems to plan and organize their unlawful actions." When requested, The Hague, Netherlands-based Eurojust would facilitate meetings between judicial representatives from the 27 EU member states. These representatives would then meet to identify ways for prosecutors to deal with VoIP calls. They would have to take into account the various data-protection rules and civil rights, not to mention the 30 different legal systems in Europe. Such proceedings can take "between a few months and several years," depending on the complexity of the issue, Eurojust spokesman Joannes Thuy told United Press International in a telephone interview Thursday. He underlined that any wiretapping would not target regular users and would have to be carried out "only as part of a criminal investigation." Authorities claim more and more criminals use Skype because they want to avoid being wiretapped. While prosecutors and intelligence agencies are easily able to listen in on landline phone calls and now even on cell phone conversations, Skype remains secure because of its complex encryption system. This increasingly frustrates prosecutors in Italy, where organized crime is abundant. In an earlier news release, Eurojust said Italian prosecutors had recently overheard a suspected drug dealer telling his accomplice to use Skype instead of his regular telephone to learn more details about a major cocaine delivery. Programs like Skype are a "huge problem in the fight against organized crime," Thuy told UPI. A Swedish-Danish co-production, Skype is one of the world's most successful communication tools. Created in 2003 by Niklas Zennstroem and Janus Friis, it was sold to eBay in 2005 and today has more than 405 million registered users. |
| Posted by:3dc |
| #3 I'm surprised real terrorists don't have chats over the voice comms in the game counter-strike? |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles the flatulent 2009-03-16 15:38 |
| #2 From this 2005 story PGP creator cooks up Net phone protection The VoIP client is based on the open-source Shtoom VoIP phone client. Zimmermann said he added cryptography to it. This is not the first time that Zimmermann has worked on putting protections on Internet telephony. Almost 10 years ago, he launched PGPfone, a little ahead of its time. "The Internet was not ready then," he said. |
| Posted by: john frum 2009-03-16 06:58 |
| #1 Someone should introduce Stephen to paragraph breaks. How hard would it be to put good pgp encryption on each end of the pipe? SIP, for example, is simply a protocol for routing encoded call data. How hard to encrypt the underlying codec? |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2009-03-16 00:21 |