[Chapter-delegates] Proposed law to ban Skype in Russia?

[Patrick Vande Walle]

Belgian authorities want to handle this differently. They plan to amend an
existing law on wiretapping to include IP telephony. This law requires the
network operator to provide wiretapping possibilities. Skype has up to now
turned down all requests from law enforcement authorities on the fact that
they are not mandated by law to provide this.

This said, it has been demonstrated in several past criminal cases over
here that convicted people were using Skype to work around fixed/mobile
phone wiretapping and geolocation by LEAs. I think there is a need to
provide this also for IP telephony. Unfortunately, any technology can get
out of control when placed in the wrong hands. It can not only be used to
track criminals, but also political opponents.

Patrick

French:
http://www.rtbf.be/info/economie/forte-augmentation-des-ecoutes-telephoniques-128964

English:
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rtbf.be%2Finfo%2Feconomie%2Fforte-augmentation-des-ecoutes-telephoniques-128964&sl=fr&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8



Marcin Cieslak wrote:


>> Unless the government has a better-than-known-state-of-the-art
>> cryptography, deciphering Skype traffic can be a challenge. You can
>> collect all the packets but there is little you can do to get an actual
>> voice payload.
>>
>> There are mechanisms like Perfect Forward Secrecy (although I am not
>> sure if employed by Skype, it is certainly used with many SSL
>> connections today) one cannot even decrypt communication that has been
>> captured at some point of time. and private keys  used to secure the
>> transmission have been recovered later (e.g. when authorities seize the
>> computer).



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